It Is (Almost) All about Human Safety: A Novel Paradigm for Robot Design, Control, and Planning

摘要

In this paper we review our work on safe control, acting, and planning in human environments. In order for a robot to be able to safely interact with its environment it is necessary to be able to react to unforeseen events in real-time on basically all levels of abstraction. Having this goal in mind, our contributions reach from fundamental understanding of human injury due to robot-human collisions as the underlying metric for "safe" behavior, various interaction control schemes that ground on the basic components impedance control and collision behavior, to safe realtime motion planning and behavior based control as an interface level for task planning. Based on this foundation, we also developed joint interaction planners for role allocation in human-robot collaborative assembly, as well as reactive safety oriented replanning algorithms. A very recent step was the development of novel programming paradigms that act as a simple yet powerful interface between programmer, automatic planning, and the robot. A significant amount of our work on robot safety and control has found found its way into international standardization committees, products, and was applied in numerous real-world applications.