Designing A Dummy Skin by Evaluating Contacts between A Human Hand and A Robot End Tip

Many manufacturing industries have a high demand for the construction of collaborative operation systems using industrial robots. Although there is a preexisting set of safety verification data in ISO/TS 15066 for collaborative operations, there is no established testing method for safety validation. To establish a testing method, it is effective to use a dummy that has mechanical properties similar to those of a human. However, there is no parametric study that exists for designing a dummy that represents the static and dynamic mechanical properties and the nonlinearity of the static mechanical properties. In this study, static and dynamic experiments were conducted to obtain the mechanical stiffness of human subjects and the contact force transitions during the dynamic contact between a robot system and a human. Subsequently, the same experiment was conducted using the proposed dummy. The biofidelity of the dummy was examined by comparing the parameters of a viscoelastic model. This study contributes to increasing the safety of collaborative operations by developing a dummy that can be used for risk assessments in collaborative operations.