Online Verification of Impact-Force-Limiting Control for Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Humans must remain unharmed during their interaction with robots. We present a new method guaranteeing impact force limits when humans and robots share a workspace. Formal guarantees are realized using an online verification method, which plans and verifies fail-safe maneuvers through predicting reachable impact forces by considering all future possible scenarios. We model collisions as a coupled human-robot dynamical system with uncertainties and identify reachset-conforming models based on real-world collision experiments. The effectiveness of our approach for human-robot co-existence is demonstrated for the human hand interacting with the end effector of a six-axis robot manipulator with force sensing. By integrating a human pose detection system, the efficiency of robot movements increases.