Safety in human-multi robot collaborative scenarios: a trajectory scaling approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a trajectory scaling method to ensure human safety in multi-robot collaborative tasks by dynamically adjusting robot trajectories based on a safety index involving human and robot positions and velocities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel safety index and a trajectory scaling approach for multi-robot systems to enhance human safety during cooperative manipulation tasks.

Findings

The approach effectively maintains safety thresholds in simulations.

Trajectory scaling adapts to human-robot relative positions and velocities.

The method ensures safety without compromising task performance.

Abstract

In this paper, a strategy to handle the human safety in a multi-robot scenario is devised. In the presented framework, it is foreseen that robots are in charge of performing any cooperative manipulation task which is parameterized by a proper task function. The devised architecture answers to the increasing demand of strict cooperation between humans and robots, since it equips a general multi-robot cell with the feature of making robots and human working together. The human safety is properly handled by defining a safety index which depends both on the relative position and velocity of the human operator and robots. Then, the multi-robot task trajectory is properly scaled in order to ensure that the human safety never falls below a given threshold which can be set in worst conditions according to a minimum allowed distance. Simulations results are presented in order to prove the effectiveness of the approach.