In factories of the future, humans and robots are expected to be co-workers and co-inhabitants in the flexible production lines. It is important to ensure that humans and robots do not harm each other. This paper is concerned with functional issues to ensure safe and efficient interactions among human workers and the next generation intelligent industrial co-robots. The robot motion planning and control problem in a human involved environment is posed as a constrained optimal control problem. A modularized parallel controller structure is proposed to solve the problem online, which includes a baseline controller that ensures efficiency, and a safety controller that addresses real time safety by making a safe set invariant. Capsules are used to represent the complicated geometry of humans and robots. The design considerations of each module are discussed. Simulation studies which reproduce realistic scenarios are performed on a planar robot arm and a 6 DoF robot arm. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the method.
['Changliu Liu', 'Masayoshi Tomizuka']
Algorithmic safety measures for intelligent industrial co-robots