Towards Safe Multi-Level Human-Robot Interaction in Industrial Tasks

Zhe Huang, Ye-Ji Mun, Haonan Chen, Yiqing Xie, Yilong Niu, Xiang Li, Ninghan Zhong, Haoyuan You, D. Livingston McPherson, Katherine Driggs Campbell

Abstract: Multiple levels of safety measures are required by multiple interaction modes which collaborative robots need to perform industrial tasks with human co-workers. We develop three independent modules to account for safety in different types of human-robot interaction: vision-based safety monitoring pauses robot when human is present in a shared space; contact-based safety monitoring pauses robot when unexpected contact happens between human and robot; hierarchical intention tracking keeps robot in a safe distance from human when human and robot work independently, and switches robot to compliant mode when human intends to guide robot. We discuss the prospect of future research in development and integration of multi-level safety modules. We focus on how to provide safety guarantees for collaborative robot solutions with human behavior modeling.