Safety Evaluation Method of Design and Control for Human-Care Robots

We propose the world’s first general method of evaluating safety for human-care robots. In the case of a careless collision between a robot and a human, impact force and impact stress are chosen as evaluation measures, and a danger-index is defined to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of each safety strategy used for design and control. As a result, this proposed method allows us to assess the contribution of each safety strategy to the overall safety performance of a human-care robot. In addition, a new type of three-dimensional robot simulation system for danger evaluation is constructed on a PC. The system simplifies the danger evaluation of both the design and control of various types of human-care robots to quantify the effectiveness of various safety strategies. KEY WORDS—human-care robot, safety evaluation, danger index, safety design and control