A new actuation approach for human friendly robot design

Abstract

AbsIracr-In recent years, many successful robotic manipulator designs have been introduced. However, there remains the challenge of designing a manipulator that possesses the inherent safety characteristics necessary for human-centered robotics. In this paper, we present a new actuation approach that has the requisite characteristics for inherent safety while maintaining the performance expected of modern designs. By drastically reducing the effectire impedance of the manipulator while maintaining high frequency torque capability, we show that the competing design requirements of performance and safety can be successfully integrated into a single manipulation system.

Injury evaluation of human-robot impacts

“…Because such crashtests are very expensive 1 , we decided to use the resulting outcome of the impact tests to built up a simplified setup that mimics a HybridIII dummy head and use it for the evaluation of other robots. These results indicate that a robot, even with arbitrary mass driving not much faster than 2 m/s is not able to become dangerous to a non-clamped human head with respect to typical severity indices 2 (HIC) [7], defined as…”

“…In this video the effect of robot mass, robot speed, and constraints in the environment on injury severity during human-robot impacts are explained and supported by various crash-tests. Although there is some literature present treating safety issues in human-robot interaction [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], there was so far no effort taken to analyze real world threats via impact tests at standardized crash-test facilities. This was to our knowledge only carried out in [6] up to now.…”

Towards a novel safety norm for domestic robotics

“…Several conceptual design novelties are introduced in e.g. [1], [5] and [6]. These robotic arms are designed to reduce impact loads in the case of unintended collisions.…”

“…For quantifying acceleration (shock) traumas to the head, both [8], [6] and [5] proposed the Head Injury Criterion (HIC) as quantitative severity measure for unintended blunt impacts to the head. The HIC discriminates between severe and less severe traumatic brain injuries caused by internal stretching and tearing of (brain) tissue [9].…”

Proactive Intention-based Safety through Human Location Anticipation in HRI Workspace

“…The approach in [8] applies the whole body robot viscoelastic covering. The approaches [9] and [10] use distributed parallel actuations as a mechanical design solution for HRI safety. Similarly approach [11] proposes mechanical safeguarding measures.…”