Safe Physical Human-Robot Interaction through Sensorless External Force Estimation for Industrial Robots

Abstract

The presented research work introduces the safe limitation of contact forces between an industrial robot and its human operator during physical collaboration. While estimating these contact forces with a physics algorithm in the robot control software, they can be easily limited before getting harmful. The developed algorithms allow the user to stop and move the robot arm with moderate effort and therefore he feels safe during interaction. Through bypassing and redesigning the position feed-back controllers of the robot, the drive output torques can be held under the critical threshold calculated via Newton-Euler dynamics. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.