Over the last two decades, the foundations for physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) have evolved from successful developments in mechatronics, control, and planning, leading toward safer lightweight robot designs and interaction control schemes that advance beyond the current capacities of existing high-payload and highprecision position-controlled industrial robots. Based on their ability to sense physical interaction, render compliant behavior along the robot structure, plan motions that respect human preferences, and generate interaction plans for collaboration and coaction with humans, these novel robots have opened up novel and unforeseen application domains, and have advanced the field of human safety in robotics.
This chapter gives an overview on the state of the art in pHRI as of the date of publication. First, the advances in human safety are outlined, addressing topics in human injury analysis in robotics and safety standards for pHRI. Then, the foundations of human-friendly robot design, including the development of lightweight and intrinsically flexible force/torque-controlled machines together with the required perception abilities for interaction are introduced. Subsequently, motionplanning techniques for human environments, including the domains of biomechanically safe, risk-metric-based, human-aware planning are covered. Finally, the rather recent problem of interaction planning is summarized, including the issues of collaborative action planning, the definition of the interaction planning problem, and an introduction to robot reflexes and reactive control architecture for pHRI.
Mobile robot helper - Mr. Helper
Author Kazuhiro Kosuge, Manabu Sato, Norihide Kazamura
Video ID : 606
In this video, a mobile robot helper referred to as Mr. Helper is proposed. Mr. Helper consists of two 7-DOF manipulators and an omni-directional mobile base. The omnidirectional mobile base is the VUTON mechanism. In this system, a human and Mr. Helper communicate with each other by intentional force. That is, a human manipulates an object by applying intentional force/torque to the object.
We design an impedance controller for each manipulator, so that the object manipulated by both arms has a specified impedance around a specified compliance center.
Refrence: ICRA 2000 Video Abstracts.