Integration of perception, control and injury knowledge for safe human-robot interaction

In the past few years the need for more flexibility in industrial production has implied a growing attention towards scenarios where humans work directly in touch with robots. In order to allow safe human-robot interaction, a methodology to evaluate the severity of an impact between a human worker and an industrial robot, based on related work on injury knowledge in human-robot contacts and relying on information coming from different exteroceptive sensors, has been developed in this paper. On the basis of this severity evaluation, the robot controller enforces a suitable safety-oriented strategy, ranging from on-path speed reduction to task-consistent evasive motion and protective stop. The safety evaluation methodology has been implemented in a dedicated software component, integrated with a video surveillance system and with the real time robot controller to obtain a complete HW/SW architecture named “Safety Controller”. The system has been validated on an ABB IRB140 robot.