Reactive Collision Avoidance Strategies for Robots in direct Human-Robot Interaction

Kurzfassung

In the near future robots are sought to become an integral part of human everyday life. Also in industrial settings robotic Co-Workers are expected to become a commodity. Even though the particular application areas may vastly change, a robot always needs to act in a dynamic and partially unknown environment. It shall reactively generate motions and prevent upcoming collisions. If contact is desired or inevitable, it has to handle it robustly and safely. In order to evaluate existing algorithms an extensive simulation environment with test scenarios of rising complexity in 2D, 3D, and 6D was developed. After an initial analysis in rather complex 2D simulations, particularly well suited ones were extended to 3D as well as 6D, and combined into a hybrid strategy. Finally, the 6D MATLAB/Simulink/StateFlow implementation of a hybrid Circular & Potential Fields approach is used to perform the experimental analysis for static multi-object parcours and to avoid dynamically moving humans in a 6D task motion. Furthermore, we developed and tested a high-performance algorithm for tactile exploration of complex planar 3D wire elements, whose structure is a-priori unknown.