Safe acting and manipulation in human environments: A key concept for robots in our society

In this paper we review our work on safe acting and manipulation in human environments. In order for a robot to be able to safely interact with its environment it is primary to be able to react to unforeseen events in real-time on basically all levels of abstraction. Having this goal in mind, our contributions reach from fundamental understanding of human injury due to robot-human collisions as the underlying metric for “safe” behavior, various interaction control schemes that ground on the basic components impedance control and collision behavior, to real-time motion planning and behavior based control as an interface level for task planning. A significant amount of this work has found found its way into international standardization committees, products, and was applied in numerous real-world applications.