Safe, Passive Control for Mechanical Systems with Application to Physical Human-Robot Interactions
This addresses safety for robots interacting with humans, but it is incremental as it builds on existing control methods.
The paper tackled the problem of ensuring safety in physical human-robot interactions by proposing a control law that enforces region, velocity, and passivity constraints, and demonstrated its effectiveness on a 6-DOF robot.
In this paper, we propose a novel safe, passive, and robust control law for mechanical systems. The proposed approach addresses safety from a physical human-robot interaction perspective, where a robot must not only stay inside a pre-defined region, but respect velocity constraints and ensure passivity with respect to external perturbations that may arise from a human or the environment. The proposed control is written in closed-form, behaves well even during singular configurations, and allows any nominal control law to be applied inside the operating region as long as the safety requirements (e.g., velocity) are adhered to. The proposed method is implemented on a 6-DOF robot to demonstrate its effectiveness during a physical human-robot interaction task.