Motion Planning for Human–Robot Collaboration Using an Objective-Switching Strategy

Motion planning of collaborative robots is often required to simultaneously satisfy the contradictory objectives of reliably avoiding human workers and safely approaching them. In this article, we propose a new strategy that adaptively selects one of two objective functions based on the current operational region of the robot; the objective function for avoiding the worker with a distance larger than the safe distance, and the objective function for approaching the worker with a speed limitation for human safety. This strategy improves the worker safety while limiting the negative impact of the speed limit on time efficiency. The chattering related to the switching between the two objectives is solved using a continuous approximation of the switching based on uncertainties of the predicted worker's motion. We implement the proposed motion planning with the objective-switching strategy into a collaborative assembly system to deal with the worker moving with high irregularities. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed motion planning from the safety and efficiency points of view.