Safety Map: A Unified Representation for Biomechanics Impact Data and Robot Instantaneous Dynamic Properties

Abstract

Close physical human-robot interaction makes it essential to ensure human safety. In particular, the intrinsic safety characteristics of a robot in terms of potential human injury have to be understood well. Then, minimal potential harm can be made a key requirement already at an early stage of the robot design. In this paper, we propose the safety map concept, a map that captures human injury occurrence and robot inherent global or task-dependent safety properties in a unified manner, making it a novel, powerful, and convenient tool to quantitatively analyze the safety performance of a certain robot design. In this paper, we derive the concept and elaborate the map representations of the PUMA 560, KUKA Lightweight Robot IV+, and injury data of the human head and chest. For the latter, we classify and summarize the most relevant impact studies and extend existing literature overviews. Finally, we validate our approach by deriving the safety map for a pick and place task, which allows to assess human safety and guide the task/robot designer how to take measures in order to account for both safety and task performance requirements, respectively.

Optimizing Contextual Ergonomics Models in Human-Robot Interaction

“…This algorithm is a probabilistic non-parametric approach to regression. The algorithm also provides dimensionality reduction as explained above, which can be helpful for visualizing the data or embedding the learned model into control methods for pHRI, as done with the so called safety map in [8]. Figure 5 shows the latent space visualization.…”

“…Robotic safety, which focuses on immediate rather than long-term injuries, has seen a similar development, i.e. from off-line static assessments to safetyaware controllers [8]. The contributions of this paper are the following:…”

A Platform Programming Paradigm for Heterogeneous Systems Integration

“…This article is organized as follows. To begin with, we discuss a case study from the application area of smart manufacturing [5] and highlight the functional properties that have to be preserved during integration. Since the issues in the design process are not limited to the industrial domain, we give an overview of related work and review how the automotive domain has dealt with them so far.…”

A model‐based strategy for safety assessment of a robot arm interacting with humans

“…For that purpose, ISO/TS 15066 (the Technical Standard of the International Organization for Standardization) was created and it provides guidelines for assessing human safety, see [1]. In order to facilitate the safety assessment, in [2], a concept of safety map is introduced relating the reflected mass and maximum velocity for each robot pose to human injuries. There is a quasi-static contact that includes clamping or crushing of the person's body part between part of the robot and another fixed or moving part of the collaborative work cell.…”

“…This severely limits the flexibility of a collaborative robotic systems. In order to facilitate the safety assessment, in [2], a concept of safety map is introduced relating the reflected mass and maximum velocity for each robot pose to human injuries.…”