SPARK: Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit

TL;DR

SPARK is a comprehensive, modular benchmark and toolkit designed to enhance safety in humanoid robots through safe control algorithms, simulation benchmarks, and real-world deployment options, facilitating safer humanoid robot operation and research.

Contribution

The paper introduces SPARK, a novel modular framework and benchmark suite that enables safe control, simulation comparison, and real-world deployment for humanoid robots.

Findings

SPARK effectively improves safety in humanoid robot control.

Simulation benchmarks facilitate comparison of safety approaches.

Real-world deployment demonstrates practical safety enhancements.

Abstract

This paper introduces the Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit (SPARK), a comprehensive benchmark designed to ensure safety in humanoid autonomy and teleoperation. Humanoid robots pose significant safety risks due to their physical capabilities of interacting with complex environments. The physical structures of humanoid robots further add complexity to the design of general safety solutions. To facilitate safe deployment of complex robot systems, SPARK can be used as a toolbox that comes with state-of-the-art safe control algorithms in a modular and composable robot control framework. Users can easily configure safety criteria and sensitivity levels to optimize the balance between safety and performance. To accelerate humanoid safety research and development, SPARK provides simulation benchmarks that compare safety approaches in a variety of environments, tasks, and robot models. Furthermore, SPARK allows quick deployment of synthesized safe controllers on real robots. For hardware deployment, SPARK supports Apple Vision Pro (AVP) or a Motion Capture System as external sensors, while offering interfaces for seamless integration with alternative hardware setups at the same time. This paper demonstrates SPARK's capability with both simulation experiments and case studies with a Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Leveraging these advantages of SPARK, users and researchers can significantly improve the safety of their humanoid systems as well as accelerate relevant research. The open source code is available at: https://github.com/intelligent-control-lab/spark.