Safe human-robot interaction based on a hierarchy of bounding volumes

Abstract

This paper presents a novel human-robot interaction system which guarantees the safety of human operators which cooperate with robotic manipulators. In particular, this system computes on realtime the minimum distance between the human operator and the robotic manipulator and modify the trajectory of the robot accordingly. The system is integrated by two elements: a human tracking system and a hierarchy of bounding volumes. The tracking system combines the measurements of a motion capture system and an UWB localization system by a modified Kalman filter and thus the movements of the human are registered with accuracy. The hierarchy of bounding volumes covers the bodies of the human and the robot so that the minimum distance between them can be computed efficiently. A new distance computation algorithm based on this hierarchy has been developed. Finally, the system has been applied on a real task.