A Control Architecture for Safe Trajectory Generation in Human-Robot Collaborative Settings

This paper introduces a control architecture that enables a robotic system to ensure the safety of human operators entering its workspace. The proposed method utilizes an appropriate metric to measure safety levels and adjusts the robot's motion to maintain this metric above a minimum threshold. To guarantee safety, the robot scales down and deviates from its intended path. For redundant robots, internal motion is exploited to enhance safety levels further. The approach is incorporated into a Hierarchical Quadratic Programming control framework, allowing the robot to address other control objectives simultaneously, such as handling joint limits. Experimental results with a dual-arm mobile robot developed as part of the EU-funded CANOPIES project demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.