Tactile Sensing for Safe Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Human-robot interaction in a shared workspace permits and often even requires physical contact between humans and robots. A key technology for a safe physical human-robot interaction is the monitoring of contact forces by providing the robot with a tactile sensor as an artificial skin. This paper presents a pressure-sensitive skin for the mobile assistant robot LiSA (Life Science Assistant). It can be adapted to complex geometries and it can reliably measure contact on the entire robot body. The sensitive skin is equipped with integrated cushioning elements reducing the risk of dangerous injuries in physical human-robot interaction. Besides its safety function, the sensitive skin offers touch-based robot motion control that simplifies human-robot interaction. In the paper we describe the sensor setup and the hardware implementation on the mobile assistant robot LiSA and explain the strategies for a safe human-robot interaction. Beyond that we describe the algorithms enabling direct touch-based robot control and present some fundamental results from our evaluation experiments.