A Safe-Control Paradigm for Human-Robot Interaction

This paper introduces a new approach to control a robot manipulator in a way that is safe for humans in the robots workspace. Conceptually the robot is viewed as a tool with limited autonomy. The limited perception capabilities of automatic systems prohibits the construction of failsafe robots of the capability of people Instead, the goal of our control paradigm is to make the interaction with a robot manipulator safe by making the robots actions predictable and understandable to the human operator. At the same time the forces the robot applies with any part of its body to its environment have to be controllable and limited. Experimental results are presented of a human-friendly robot controller that is under development for a Barrett Whole Arm Manipulator robot.