Obstacle Avoidance Behavior Combining Dodging Control and Movable Soft Material

In recent years, robots have been spreading into our living spaces. In everyday life, humans and robots are often in the same space. In such spaces, robots are sometimes subjected to physical impacts from various objects. If the robot collides with a human, the human will be injured. If the robot collides with a hard object, the robot will be damaged. For these reasons, it is important to avoid physical shocks from the outside and to reduce the shocks to a level where they do not become a problem in the event of a collision. In this letter, we focus on obstacle avoidance behavior for safe human–robot interaction and aim to mitigate the impact by combining dodging control and movable soft material. As a result of comparative experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed approach could mitigate the force and reduce the impact.