A Concise Overview of Safety Aspects in Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This paper reviews safety considerations in human-robot interaction, proposing a multi-layered safety architecture that combines physical and cognitive safety measures to enhance human-robot collaboration and facilitate safety certification.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-layered safety architecture integrating physical and cognitive safety aspects, supporting safety certification in diverse HRI scenarios.

Findings

Proposed a multi-layered safety architecture for HRI

Addressed human factors and perceived safety in safety design

Enabled safety certification across various HRI scenarios

Abstract

As of today, robots exhibit impressive agility but also pose potential hazards to humans using/collaborating with them. Consequently, safety is considered the most paramount factor in human-robot interaction (HRI). This paper presents a multi-layered safety architecture, integrating both physical and cognitive aspects for effective HRI. We outline critical requirements for physical safety layers as service modules that can be arbitrarily queried. Further, we showcase an HRI scheme that addresses human factors and perceived safety as high-level constraints on a validated impact safety paradigm. The aim is to enable safety certification of human-friendly robots across various HRI scenarios.