Safety-aware trajectory scaling for Human-Robot Collaboration with prediction of human occupancy

Planning and control of an industrial manipulator for safe Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is a difficult task because of two conflicting requirements: ensuring the worker´s safety and completing the task assigned to the robot. This paper proposes a trajectory scaling algorithm for safe HRC that relies on real-time prediction of human occupancy. Knowing the space that the human will occupy within the robot stopping time, the controller can scale the manipulator´s velocity allowing safe HRC and avoiding task interruption. Finally, experimental results are presented and discussed.