Human guidance programming on a 6-DoF robot with collision avoidance

In the application of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), the collaboration between human and robot can significantly improve the production efficiency through combination of the human's flexible intelligence and the robot's consistent performance. In this application, however, it is an important concern to ensure the safety of the human and the robot. In the human guidance programming scenario, the operator plans a collision-free path for the robot end-effector, but the robot body might collide with an obstacle while being guided by the operator. In this paper, a novel on-line velocity based collision avoidance algorithm is developed to solve the problem in this particular scenario. The proposed algorithm gives an explicit solution to deal with both collision avoidance and human guidance command at the same time, which provides the operator a better and safer lead through programming experience. The real-time experiment is performed on FANUC LR Mate 200 iD/7L in three different obstacle scenarios.