Evaluation of Collision Detection and Reaction for a Human-Friendly Robot on Biological Tissues

Abstract

Up to now, mostly blunt human-robot impacts were investigated in the robotics literature. In this context, the influence of robot mass and velocity during rigid impacts with and without the possibility of the human being clamped was quantified. In this paper an analysis of soft-tissue injuries caused by sharp tools which are mounted on/grasped by a robot and an evaluation of possible countermeasures are carried out as the next step down the road to full safety for robots in physical Human-Robot Interaction. To our knowledge for the first time in robotics, we present various experimental results with biological tissues showing the high performance of our collision detection and reaction schemes even for contacts with sharp tools.