Experimental Analysis and Modeling of Superficial Pain on Upper Limb

In the environment where human coexists with robot, safety design of the robot is important. However, it is difficult to separate the robot from the human in time-domain or space-domain unlike factory automation, so a new concept for safety is needed. A new approach is to take notice of sensory and emotional feeling of human, and in this study "pain" has been focused, which is a typical unpleasant feeling when we contact objects. For engineering application of the pain, we have proposed an artificial superficial pain model that is represented by 2-mass system and demonstrated its application to robot avoidance motion. In the research, the pain caused by one kind of stimulus on a fingertip was evaluated. However, the characteristic of the pain is change depending on point and strength of stimulus. In this paper, to confirm the effectiveness of the artificial superficial pain model, superficial pain on upper limb is analyzed and modeling of superficial pain on upper limb is considered based on the experimental results