Pre-collision safety strategies for human-robot interaction

Abstract

Safe planning and control is essential to bringing human-robot interaction into common experience. This paper presents an integrated human−robot interaction strategy that ensures the safety of the human participant through a coordinated suite of safety strategies that are selected and implemented to anticipate and respond to varying time horizons for potential hazards and varying expected levels of interaction with the user. The proposed planning and control strategies are based on explicit measures of danger during interaction. The level of danger is estimated based on factors influencing the impact force during a human-robot collision, such as the effective robot inertia, the relative velocity and the distance between the robot and the human.A second key requirement for improving safety is the ability of the robot to perceive its environment, and more specifically, human behavior and reaction to robot movements. This paper also proposes and demonstrates the use of human monitoring information based on vision and physiological sensors to further improve the safety of the human robot interaction. A methodology for integrating sensor-based information about the user's position and physiological reaction to the robot into medium and short-term safety strategies is presented. This methodology is verified through a series of experimental test cases where a human and an articulated robot respond to each other based on the human's physical and physiological behavior.

An Investigation of Responses to Robot-Initiated Touch in a Nursing Context

“…Several researchers have employed GSR to characterize people's responses during HRI or to enable a robot to respond to a human's affective state [21,28,35,39,45].…”

Environmental Hazard Analysis - a Variant of Preliminary Hazard Analysis for Autonomous Mobile Robots

“…mation and fast reaction times, in order to work with 146 and around humans [11,25]. Work by [2] which is similar to this paper, is that of Guiochet and 159 Baron [14], Guiochet et al [15], Martin-Guillerez-et 160 al.…”

“…In almost every application 25 of mobile robots other than toys, the size, power or 26 speed of robots will be such that potential hazards 27 will be associated with their operation or malfunction. 28 Legal regulations in most countries require that any 29 such safety critical system be designed so as to reduce 30 the risk of accidents caused by these hazards to less 31 than some required threshold, or at least as low as is 32 reasonably practicable.…”

Proactive Intention-based Safety through Human Location Anticipation in HRI Workspace

“…The cell occupancy is calculated for each cell C i,j of the grid G (Algo. 3. line [4][5][6][7][8]. A 2D Gaussian is placed on each cell of the grid that belongs to the estimated path P est of the human path.…”

“…The approach in [1] used the safe guard zone strategy, i.e., if a human is detected in the safeguard zone then robot's control sequence is altered to ensure HRI safety. In [6] pre-collision strategies are discussed to avoid collision between the human and the robot. The focus of the approach in [6] is control strategies based on explicitly defined measure of danger while in [7] pedestrians behaviour prediction is done to ensure safety.…”