Human multi-robot safe interaction: A trajectory scaling approach based on safety assessment

Nowadays, industrial robotics requires that robots and humans share the same workspace and collaborate to a certain extent. In such a scenario, the safety is the minimum requirement and, for this reason, many off-the-shelf collaborative robots are now available on the market which, basically, are able to limit the contact forces in the case of impact. Differently from many different works, this article presents a solution to human multi-robot safe interaction in which multiple mobile manipulators are in charge of performing a cooperative task in a workspace shared with human operators. The safety of the interaction is assessed by a safety field that considers the whole system and is general enough concerning its expression. Based on the value of this field, the cooperative task trajectory is properly modified so as to ensure a safe interaction while trying to preserve as much as possible the nominal task, which is instead completely aborted whenever the safety of the interaction cannot be guaranteed. The solution is first designed within a centralized architecture and, then, upon this, a distributed implementation is presented, which, in general, aims to exhibit the same performance as the centralized counterpart. Finally, both simulations and experiments on real industrial robots corroborate the designed solution.