A General Safety Framework for Autonomous Manipulation in Human Environments
🤖 AI Summary
Ensuring safety for autonomous robotic manipulators in human–robot coexistence scenarios remains challenging—existing approaches are either overly conservative or rely on restrictive assumptions (e.g., predefined trajectories) incompatible with autonomy.
Method: This paper introduces SaRA-shield, a formal safety framework integrating reachability analysis, dynamics modeling, online kinetic energy threshold verification, and power/force-limiting control, embedded within an AI-driven robotic arm system. Crucially, it proposes the first dynamic collision-type classification mechanism based on reachability analysis, enabling real-time, anatomically informed assignment of kinetic energy limits according to body region and collision modality (impact vs. pinch).
Results: Real-world experiments demonstrate millisecond-scale dynamic velocity reduction, guaranteeing contact kinetic energy remains strictly below established pain and injury thresholds. The framework significantly enhances operational efficiency and responsiveness while ensuring certified human safety.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Autonomous robots are projected to augment the manual workforce, especially in repetitive and hazardous tasks. For a successful deployment of such robots in human environments, it is crucial to guarantee human safety. State-of-the-art approaches to ensure human safety are either too restrictive to permit a natural human-robot collaboration or make strong assumptions that do not hold when for autonomous robots, e.g., knowledge of a pre-defined trajectory. Therefore, we propose SaRA-shield, a power and force limiting framework for AI-based manipulation in human environments that gives formal safety guarantees while allowing for fast robot speeds. As recent studies have shown that unconstrained collisions allow for significantly higher contact forces than constrained collisions (clamping), we propose to classify contacts by their collision type using reachability analysis. We then verify that the kinetic energy of the robot is below pain and injury thresholds for the detected collision type of the respective human body part in contact. Our real-world experiments show that SaRA-shield can effectively reduce the speed of the robot to adhere to injury-preventing energy limits.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Ensuring human safety in autonomous robot manipulation tasks
Overcoming conservative or unrealistic safety assumptions in human-robot collaboration
Limiting robot contact forces to prevent human pain or injury
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
SARA shield ensures safety via reachability analysis
Classifies contacts to limit kinetic energy
Improves robot speed while meeting safety standards
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