ROBOTIC ARM COLLISION REACTION STRATEGIES FOR SAFE HUMAN–ROBOT INTERACTION WITHOUT TORQUE SENSORS

Abstract

Three kinds of collision reaction strategies for increasing safety during human and robot interactions without relying on torque sensors are proposed in this paper. In the proposed algorithms, motor torque is estimated by driver current. The generalized momentum observer is used for collision detection, which does not need joints acceleration information and calculates the inverse of the inertia matrix. Three different collision reaction strategies, going away, dragging by hands and mechanical impedance developed in this paper, aim to enhance safety to humans during physical interaction with robots. For verifying the efficiency of the proposed algorithms, experiments are tested between a 1-DOF manipulator system and a human being. At last, the experiments’ results show that the proposed collision reaction algorithms are effective.