Functional Mode Switching for Safe and Efficient Human-Robot Interaction

Various approaches can ascertain the safety and efficiency of physical human-robot collaboration. This paper presents the concept of robot functional mode switching to efficiently ensure human safety during collaborative tasks based on biomechanical pain and injury data and task information. Besides the robot's reflected inertial properties summarizing its impact dynamics, our concept also integrates safe and smooth velocity shaping that respects human partner motion, interaction type, and task knowledge. We further discuss different approaches to safely shape the robot velocity without sacrificing the overall task execution time and motion smoothness. The experimental results showed that our proposed approaches could decrease jerk level during functional mode switching and limit the impact of safety measures on productivity, especially when guided with additional task knowledge.