Ensuring Safety in Human-Robot Coexistence Environment

This paper proposes a safety index and an associated formulation in the optimization-based path planning framework to assess and ensure the safety of human workers in a human-robot coexistence environment. The safety index is evaluated using the ellipsoid coordinates (EC) attached to the robot links that represents the distance between the robot arm and the worker. To account for the inertial effect, the momentum of the robot links are projected onto the coordinates to generate additional measures of safety. The safety index is used as a constraint in the optimization problem so that a collision-free trajectory within a finite time horizon is generated online iteratively for the robot to move towards the desired position. To reduce the computational load for real-time implementation, the formulated optimization problem is further approximated by a quadratic problem. The safety index and the proposed formulations are simulated and validated in a two-link planar robot and the ITRI 7-DoF robot with a human worker moving inside the workspace of the robots.