Safe Collision and Clamping Reaction for Parallel Robots During Human-Robot Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive safety strategy for parallel robots during human-robot collaboration, combining contact detection, reactive retraction, impedance adjustment, and neural network-based classification to ensure rapid and effective collision and clamping responses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated safety approach using proprioceptive sensing, neural networks, and kinematic projections for collision and clamping mitigation in parallel robots.

Findings

Reaction time under 130ms in all contact scenarios

Neural network classification accuracy of 80% for clamping detection

Effective contact force limitation to 70N during experiments

Abstract

Parallel robots (PRs) offer the potential for safe human-robot collaboration because of their low moving masses. Due to the in-parallel kinematic chains, the risk of contact in the form of collisions and clamping at a chain increases. Ensuring safety is investigated in this work through various contact reactions on a real planar PR. External forces are estimated based on proprioceptive information and a dynamics model, which allows contact detection. Retraction along the direction of the estimated line of action provides an instantaneous response to limit the occurring contact forces within the experiment to 70N at a maximum velocity 0.4m/s. A reduction in the stiffness of a Cartesian impedance control is investigated as a further strategy. For clamping, a feedforward neural network (FNN) is trained and tested in different joint angle configurations to classify whether a collision or clamping occurs with an accuracy of 80%. A second FNN classifies the clamping kinematic chain to enable a subsequent kinematic projection of the clamping joint angle onto the rotational platform coordinates. In this way, a structure opening is performed in addition to the softer retraction movement. The reaction strategies are compared in real-world experiments at different velocities and controller stiffnesses to demonstrate their effectiveness. The results show that in all collision and clamping experiments the PR terminates the contact in less than 130ms.