Safety is the first and foremost step on our long journey to a future in which robots are moving out of the cage to collaborate with and assist people in various fields from entertainment to manufacturing. Different from the well-defined structured environment, safe robot control in a workspace with moving objects, e.g. a human, requires us to control the robot motion on the fly. In order to computationally efficiently achieve a feasible solution, we propose a constraint-based programming approach to guarantee the safe human-robot interaction. We use an optimization framework to integrate constraints from two-fold: the robot control constraints that are responsible for a generic robotic task and the online formulated safety constraints that are responsible for safe human-robot interaction. In this way, we preserve the task execution ability of a robot while guarantee the safe human-robot interaction. We validate the proposed approach with a Schunk industrial manipulator. The experimental results confirms the fact that the proposed approach has the potential to enable an industrial manipulator to work with a human coworker side-by-side.
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