As the use of service robots becomes more popular, many solutions to ensure human safety during human-robot collision have been proposed. In this paper, we address one of the most fundamental solutions to design an inherently safe robot manipulator. A collision model is developed to evaluate the collision safety of any spatial manipulator. Most collision studies have focused on collision analysis and safety evaluation, but not on the use of evaluation results to design a safer robot arm. Therefore, we propose a collision model that relates design parameters to collision safety by adopting effective mass and manipulability. The model was then simplified with several assumptions. Furthermore, experimental results from biomechanical literature were employed to describe a human-robot collision. The major advantage of this collision model is that it can be used to systemically determine the design parameters of a robot arm.
Human-robot cooperation have a potential risk of collision between a human and a robot, and collision detection is one of the most practical solutions to ensure human safety during this cooperation. However, collisions during human-robot cooperation cannot be reliably detected using conventional collision detection methods because collision forces and intended interaction forces cannot be distinguished from each other. In this study, we propose a collision detection method that can be used to distinguish collisions from intended task force at the end-effector. To this end, we developed a collision detection index that is decoupled from the intended external force applied for human-robot cooperation. The proposed method was verified through several experiments, and experimental results show that collisions can be detected regardless of the presence of physical contact between humans and robots for cooperati on.
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