Multi-Scenario Contacts Handling for Collaborative Robots Applications

Abstract

The goal of this work is to propose a way of dealing with physical interactions for collaborative robots that will ensure the safety of a human operator and improve the performance of a common task by implementing multiple robot behavior scenarios. In this scope, all collisions of a robotic arm are detected and analyzed to chooses an appropriate reaction strategy. The points of contact on the robot’s surface for each collision are estimated, the external forces are identified and collisions are classified by the set of predefined categories. Based on these categories and the current robot state, the algorithm chose an appropriate behavior scenario.All presented algorithms are based only on proprioceptive sensors information and were tested in a simulated environment and on the real collaborative robots KUKA iiwa and Universal Robots UR10e. The result for contact localization showed 4 cm mean accuracy, the classification algorithm was able to identify collisions with hard and soft objects with 98% accuracy for KUKA iiwa 14.