A Short Paper about Motion Safety

Motion safety for robotic systems operating in the real world is critical (especially when their size and dynamics make them potentially harmful for themselves or their environment). Motion safety is a taken-for-granted and ill-defined notion in the Robotics literature and the primary contribution of this paper is to propose three safety criteria that helps in understanding a number of key aspects related to the motion safety issue. A number of navigation schemes used by robotic systems operating in the real-world are then evaluated with respect to these safety criteria. It is established that, in all cases, they violate one or several of them. Accordingly, motion safety, especially in the presence of moving objects, cannot be guaranteed (in the sense that these robotic systems may end up in a situation where a collision inevitably occurs later in the future). Finally, it is shown that the concept of inevitable collision states introduced by Fraichard and Asama (2004) does respect the three above-mentioned safety criteria and therefore offers a theoretical answer to the motion safety issue.