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A Human-Robot Dynamic Fusion Safety Algorithm for Collaborative Operations of Cobots

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Abstract

The most popular safety scheme for human-robot collaboration is that the robot will stop and wait at human’s approach. This paper aims to tackle the practically very challenging problem of the balance between efficiency and safety in the safety scheme aforementioned in the intelligent manufacturing industry. The human-robot dynamic fusion algorithm (HRDF) was proposed in this paper to ensure the safety of humans initiatively, in favor of reducing the stop times of the collaborative operations. In this algorithm, the digital dynamics model of human was built and employed to estimate the minimum distance between human and robot in real-time. And the virtual force can be calculated based on the minimum distance above. Subsequently, the value and the time duration of the virtual force were employed to evaluate the safety status of human-robot system. Then, robot can conduct safety planning initiatively according to the safety status. In practice, the average response time taken from the detection of the distance change of human-robot to the adjustment of robot is 0.05s with our algorithm. Above all, the effectiveness of our approach is verified empirically with contact maintenance experiments in a non-stop mode. And the HRDF can maximally increase efficiency by 26.4% compared with the traditional stop-maintenance-restart safety mode.

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Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support that Shiqi Li and Shuai Zhang received from the HUST & UBTECH Intelligent Service Robots Joint Lab.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Psychological Sciences, Zhejiang University, 310058, Hangzhou, China

    Shuai Zhang

  2. School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 430074, Wuhan, China

    Shiqi Li & Xiao Li

  3. HUST&UBTECH Intelligent Service Robots Joint Lab, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 430074, Wuhan, China

    Xiao Li

  4. UBTECH Robotics CORP LTD, 518000, Shenzhen, China

    Youjun Xiong & Zheng Xie

Authors
  1. Shuai Zhang
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  2. Shiqi Li
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  3. Xiao Li
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  4. Youjun Xiong
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  5. Zheng Xie
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Contributions

Shuai Zhang and Shiqi Li conceived and designed the study. Shuai Zhang and Xiao Li performed the experiments. Youjun Xiong And Zheng Xie provided the robot. Shuai Zhang wrote the paper. Shuai Zhang, Shiqi Li and Youjun Xiong reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript. Most of the work of this paper were accomplish by Shuai Zhang in the period of pursuing the Ph.D. degree at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. And the revised work of this paper were done by Shuai Zhang when he does postdoctoral research at the the Center for Psychological Sciences, Zhejiang University.

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Correspondence to Shiqi Li.

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Zhang, S., Li, S., Li, X. et al. A Human-Robot Dynamic Fusion Safety Algorithm for Collaborative Operations of Cobots. J Intell Robot Syst 104, 18 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01534-8

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