Safety in human-multi robot collaborative scenarios: a trajectory scaling approach
This addresses safety concerns for human operators working alongside multiple robots, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing trajectory scaling methods.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring human safety in multi-robot collaborative scenarios by scaling robot trajectories based on a safety index that considers relative position and velocity, with simulations used to demonstrate effectiveness.
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.