A Hierarchical Framework for Robot Safety using Whole-body Tactile Sensors

Using tactile signal is a natural way to perceive potential dangers and safeguard robots. One possible method is to use full-body tactile sensors on the robot and perform safety maneuvers when dangerous stimuli are detected. In this work, we proposed a method based on full-body tactile sensors that operates at three different levels of granularity to ensure that robot interacts with the environment safely. The results showed that our system dramatically reduced the overall collision chance compared with several baselines, and intelligently handled current collisions. Our proposed framework is generalizable to a wide variety of robots, enabling them to predict and avoid dangerous collisions and reactively handle accidental tactile stimuli.