18 accepted papers
As of today, automating contact-rich industrial manipulation processes, such as insertion, plugging, and screw-driving, is tedious and requires expert knowledge. The processes consist of programmable, common action units, like moving to a pose and establishing contact. However, the user still has to…
Efficient and safe integration of robots into human workspaces remains a significant challenge. The ISO 10218-2 standard defines permissible force thresholds that a robot is allowed to exert on humans, along with a simple model to estimate the impact force based on the impact velocity, the involved
Robotic system development must adopt a holistic approach for tactile and dynamic tasks, shifting from the decoupled design of end-effectors and robot manipulators for traditional sequential tasks. Although established metrics exist for traditional tasks, such as pick-and-place, they lack the nuance
The increasing integration of robots in close human environments necessitates robust safety measures that can adapt to evolving tasks and conditions. Current standards rely on task-specific safety evaluations that are often inflexible, requiring repeated assessments whenever task parameters change.
Contact estimation and force sensing are fundamental requirements for sensitive manipulation and safe physical human-robot interaction. The robot controllers that enable these functions rely on accurate and precise sensing. The performance of external force estimation is influenced by the design of
The basis for robotics skill learning is an adequate representation of manipulation tasks based on their physical properties. As manipulation tasks are inherently invariant to the choice of reference frame, an ideal task representation would also exhibit this property. Nevertheless, most robotic lea…
Flexible manufacturing lines are required to meet the demand for customized and small batch-size products. Even though state-of-the-art tactile robots may provide the versatility for increased adaptability and flexibility, their potential is yet to be fully exploited. To support robotics deployment…
The use of pointed or edged tools or objects is one of the most challenging aspects of today’s application of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). One reason for this is that the severity of harm caused by such edged or pointed impactors is less well studied than for blunt impactors. Consequentl…
Safety for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is a major concern for all application domains. While current standardization for industrial robot applications provide safety constraints that address the onset of pain in blunt impacts, these impact thresholds are difficult to use on edged or poin
Limited resources and resulting energy crises occurring all over the world highlight the importance of energy efficiency in technological developments such as robotic manipulators. Efficient energy consumption of manipulators is necessary to make them affordable and spread their application in the f
Compliance with global guidelines for sustainable and responsible production in modern industry requires a comparative analysis of consumer devices' energy consumption (EC). This also holds true for the newly established generation of lightweight industrial robots (LIRs). To identify potential strat…
Strategies for safe human-robot interaction (HRI), such as the well-established Safe Motion Unit, provide a velocity scaling for biomechanically safe robot motion. In addition, psychologically-based safety approaches are required for trustworthy HRI. Such schemes can be very conservative and robot m…
In robotics, many control and planning schemes have been developed to ensure human physical safety in human-robot interaction. The human psychological state and the expectation towards the robot, however, are typically neglected. Even if the robot behaviour is regarded as biomechanically safe, human
Kinesthetic teaching of collaborative robots is applied for intuitive and flexible robot programming by demonstration. This enables non-experts to program such robots on the task-level. Multiple strategies exist to teach velocity- or torque-controlled robots and, thus, the maneuverability among comm…
In physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), safety is a key requirement. As collisions between humans and robots can generally not be avoided, it must be ensured that the human is not harmed. The robot reflected mass, the contact geometry, and the relative velocity between human and robot are the pa…
In physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), robots need to detect and react to intended and unintended contacts in a safe manner. Proprioceptive sensing capabilities and collision detection and identification techniques differ among commercially available robots, which means that also their sensitiv…
Improving robot systems via newly-developed sensing devices, control algorithms, or state estimators in order to obtain safe and efficient human-robot interaction as well as tactile manipulation skills requires standardized performance measurement protocols for objective comparison. Common protocols…