Section: New Results

Modulation of the robot velocity capabilities according to the distance to a human

Using the setup described in 7.8, a controller has been defined to constrain the robot maximum velocity according to the distance to a human. The aim of this work is to be able to use the robot optimally at all time. When a human comes near the robot workspace, the robot must stop to avoid any dangerous interaction. Several strategies exist to reduce the robot velocity as a function of the distance to the human. In this work, the goal is to determine the maximum deceleration capabilities of the robot in real time and determine if the robot has the capacity to stop before a contact. If not, the maximum allowable joint velocities of the robot are reduced. When the human reaches the robot workspace, these joint velocities must be null to ensure safety. Simply reducing the joint velocity of the robot without modulating the trajectory would induce a bad tracking of the robot task. Hence, the trajectory is updated in real time to take into account the capacities of the robot. This work has been submitted for publication at the ICRA 2020 conference.

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