It Is (Almost) All about Human Safety: A Novel Paradigm for Robot Design, Control, and Planning

In this paper we review our work on safe control, acting, and planning in human environments. In order for a robot to be able to safely interact with its environment it is necessary 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 safe real-time motion planning and behavior based control as an interface level for task planning. Based on this foundation, we also developed joint interaction planners for role allocation in human-robot collaborative assembly, as well as reactive safety oriented replanning algorithms. A very recent step was the development of novel programming paradigms that act as a simple yet powerful interface between programmer, automatic planning, and the robot. A significant amount of our work on robot safety and control has found found its way into international standardization committees, products, and was applied in numerous real-world applications.