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2, APRIL 2016
Abstract—New paradigms in industrial robotics no longer some safety issues that need to be carefully addressed. Require-
require physical separation between robotic manipulators and ments for safe human-robot interaction were introduced for in-
humans. Moreover, in order to optimize production, humans dustrial robots in [1] and intensively investigated in [2]–[4]. Un-
and robots are expected to collaborate to some extent. In this
scenario, involving a shared environment between humans and fortunately, according to the available standards, see [5] for a re-
robots, common motion generation algorithms might turn out to view, severe restrictions are applied to the robot motion during
be inadequate for this purpose. collaboration with humans. These restrictions are usually trans-
This paper proposes a kinematic control strategy which enforces formed into conservative speed limitations (e.g., tool velocity
safety, while maintaining the maximum level of productivity of the to be less than 250 mm/s) or bounds on driving torques. One of
robot. The resulting motion of the (possibly redundant) robot is
the most intuitive ways to enforce safety during human-machine
obtained as an output of an optimization-based real-time algorithm
in which safety is regarded as a hard constraint to be satisfied. The cooperation is represented by the minimum separation distance,
methodology is experimentally validated on a dual-arm concept [6]–[8]. As the distance between the robot and the human be-
robot with 7-DOF per arm performing a manipulation task. comes smaller, the velocity of the robot should be reduced ac-
cordingly. On the other hand, even in case of a reduced separa-
Note to Practitioners—This paper discusses a way to handle tion distance, the robot should continue its task if its velocity
safety and production requirements in human-robot collaborative
working environments. A simply tractable set of constraints on the is oriented so that the distance with the human worker may
robot velocity is derived in order to meet the regulations imposed increase.
by the minimum separation distance criterion. This constraint In this scenario, safety plays the role of a hard constraint, in
can be used in real-time to limit the robot velocity, depending on which respect production could be somehow maximized. The
its distance with respect to the human, as perceived by the safe- robot trajectory must obey the following constraint1
guarding system. Delays in both the perception and the reaction
layers as well as stopping time of the robot can systematically be (1)
taken into account.
Index Terms—Human-robot collaboration, industrial robots, where is the braking time, possibly depending on the robot
motion planning, safety standards. payload, [6]. This way, provided that all the task and safety con-
straints are satisfied, the robot motion should result from a com-
promise between production (maximum or nominal speed) and
I. INTRODUCTION safety (guarded speed).
S MALL-MEDIUM ENTERPRISEs (SMEs) are expected to In order to allow for safe collaboration, robot controllers have
adapt quickly and flexibly to production changes: robotic to be equipped with sophisticated sensors as well as with ad-
manipulators represent the best candidates for this requirement. vanced reactive motion planning capabilities. In this scenario,
Moreover, for enhanced flexibility, next-generation robots are the availability of some additional degrees of freedom in the
expected to share the same environment with humans and to col- task specification can be exploited to allow the robot to react
laborate with them, to some extent. This, however, introduces to unforeseen events or to implement a safe behavior. In the
literature of safe human-robot collaboration (HRC), many re-
active control strategies have been implemented, e.g., based on
Manuscript received September 09, 2014; accepted March 01, 2015. Date of
publication April 03, 2015; date of current version April 05, 2016. This paper the minimization of some danger-related metrics [10]–[12].
was recommended for publication by Associate Editor T. Bretl and Editor J. The idea of reactive motion planning in dynamic environ-
Wen upon evaluation of the reviewers' comments. ments has been first introduced in [13] with the so-called ve-
A. M. Zanchettin and P. Rocco are with the Dipartimento di Elettronica, In-
formazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano 20133, Italy (e-mail:
locity obstacles. Particularly interesting is the concept of dy-
andreamaria.zanchettin@polimi.it; paolo.rocco@polimi.it). namic envelope developed in [14], which is a region, around
N. M. Ceriani is with Tenaris Dalmine, Dalmine 24044, Italy (e-mail: nce- the obstacle surface, whose size depends on both robot/obstacle
riani@tenaris.com).
H. Ding and B. Matthias are with the ABB Corporate Research
relative position and velocity and is guaranteed to be collision
Center, Ladenburg 68526, Germany (e-mail: hao.ding@de.abb.com; free within a certain prediction horizon. A similar concept has
bjoern.matthias@de.abb.com). been also presented in [15], as well as with the so-called in-
This paper has supplementary downloadable multimedia material available at
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org provided by the authors. The Supplementary Material
evitable collision states presented in [16]. In [17], the so-called
includes a video for the paper “Safety in Human-Robot Collaborative Manufac- distance-controlled velocity has been proposed, the key idea
turing Environments: Metrics and Control” describing the experimental verifi-
cation. This material is 37 MB in size. 1Ongoing standardization process will end up with the new standard ISO/
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TASE.2015.2412256 CDTS 15066 [9], currently in draft stage.
1545-5955 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
ZANCHETTIN et al.: SAFETY IN HUMAN-ROBOT COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENTS: METRICS AND CONTROL 883
Fig. 3. Regions to be avoided around an industrial robot in motion with nominal speed (top) and half speed (bottom). From left to right: with nominal velocity of
150 /s on the first axis, moving forward with nominal TCP velocity of 200 mm/s, and moving upward with nominal TCP velocity of 200 mm/s.
(10)
where and are the outputs of (9).
Remark: The LP problem in (9) is always feasible and its so- where represents a design parameter. When is se-
lution is always bounded. In fact, provided that (which lected, the velocity of the robot is further reduced in order to
happens asymptotically), since is the time required to stop maintain a clearance distance between the (possibly moving)
the the first links of the manipulator and , it follows obstacle and the robot itself. From a geometrical point-of-view,
that is always a solution, though not op- reducing the point-to-segment distance of a quantity is equiv-
timal. Moreover, both and are always lower and upper alent to either computing the distance between the segment rep-
bounded. It follows that the optimization algorithm needed to resenting the link and a sphere of radius centered in or
solve the problem in (9) will be always able to find a bounded, to evaluating the distance between point and a capsule of
feasible and optimal solution. Compared to alternative solu- radius built around the robot link, see Fig. 4. Therefore, the
tions based on dynamic programming, see, e.g., [32] and [33], parameter can simultaneously be used to:
adopted to optimize the velocity of the robot along a specified • take into account the size of the links of the robot;
path, the approach described here, though being slightly conser- • further denote an actual clearance distance;
vative, does not need neither the knowledge of the full path nor • account for measurement uncertainty;
the adoption of a full dynamic model of the manipulator. For • take into account the velocity of the obstacle.
886 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, VOL. 13, NO. 2, APRIL 2016
C. Nonredundant Robot
In case is a square non singular matrix, which happens
in 6-DOF industrial manipulators away from singular config-
urations, the kinematic constraints in (9c) can be solved5 with
respect to
(14)
Fig. 5. Data flow within the control algorithm for safe human-robot collabora-
tion.
Fig. 13. Activation or deactivation of the corresponding functional mode(s). (a) Autonomous behavior (both the arms), (b) Reduced speed (front), Guarded dis-
tance (side), (c) Reduced speed (front), reduced speed (side), (d) Reduced speed (front), safety exception (side), (e) Safety exception (front), safety exception
(side), (f) Safety exception (front), autonomous behavior (side).
previous demonstration, the other two behaviors reduced speed VI. DISCUSSION
and safety exception are in turn triggered by means of properly
defined distance thresholds. Distance thresholds governing the In this section, we briefly discuss possible relations of our
activation of the different mode, see Fig. 12, are computed by approach with preexisting solutions, either available in the lit-
applying the general rule in (1). In particular, they can be made erature or within commercial products.
adaptive to the programmed speed or kept fixed. When the As discussed in the introduction, many authors have already
human, standing in front of the robot, crosses the first threshold proposed methodologies in which the speed of the robot is re-
(or the one next to the robot crosses the second threshold), duced along a given path, depending on certain metrics. The se-
the reduced speed mode of the corresponding robot arm is lection of these metrics are crucial for achieving the best tradeoff
triggered. In case the human further approaches the robot and between the throughput of the robot and the safety of the human
crosses the next threshold, a safety exception is thrown and the worker(s). The aim of this section is then to compare existing
standstill mode will be triggered. As in the previous experi- approaches with the one developed herein.
mental verification, the normal operation can be automatically An approach quite similar to the one proposed in this work
recovered when the human intervention is gone. Fig. 13 shows can be found in [8]. The speed and the relative distance are
the activation or the deactivation of the corresponding func- monitored, but the adopted metrics generates a considerably dis-
tional mode during the multiple human-robot collaboration. cretized decision (robot stopped, 50% or 100% of programmed
The images of the Kinect cameras (front and side) are displayed speed), hence being suboptimal with respect to the approach
in a self-developed graphical user interface. described in this paper which adopts a continously modulated
ZANCHETTIN et al.: SAFETY IN HUMAN-ROBOT COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENTS: METRICS AND CONTROL 891
speed scaling, rather than a coarse discrete set of values. More- It uses geometrical and speed restrictions, maintaining auto-
over, only the TCP velocity, rather than the full robot, has been matic operation. Similar safety-rated control solutions of indus-
taken into account. trial robots are also available on the market like Safe Produc-
As mentioned in the introduction, the approach developed tion,10 Safe Operation,11 Dual Check Safety,12, etc. But redun-
in this paper is somehow related to the concept of inevitable dant DOF and dynamic motion planning are normally not con-
collision states originally presented in [16]. However, the con- sidered, which is different from the approach proposed in the
cept proposed in Fraichard et al. has been mainly adopted in paper.
path planning for car-like robots within an RRT-like planner. Furthermore, human workers, collaborating with conven-
In turn, our approach systematically includes the mapping be- tional industrial robots, are usually perceived by safety-rated
tween the joint and the Cartesian space by means of proper Jaco- devices like safety laser scanner, SafetyEYE13 for 3D zone
bians matrices in order to make the approach suitable for artic- monitoring, etc. However, the 3D coordinates cannot be de-
ulated industrial manipulators, with strict TCP path constraints. tected in a safety-rated way by existing commercial solutions.
Finally, in our paper, collisions are not necessarily avoided, they In the HRC applications considered in this paper, the non-safety
are only guaranteed to eventually happen with the robot still, as Kinect cameras can be used because of the inherently safety
prescribed by safety regulations. Furthermore, the extension to design of the robot and the proper risk assessment.
redundant degrees of freedom represents a novelty of this work, Different from manual assembly, robotic automation and
with respect to the state-of-the-art. fixed automation, HRC has its own benefit while considering
In [23] and [30], Haddadin et al. proposed a trajectory scaling the production volume and the unit cost, like the manufacturing
algorithm originally based on torque monitoring, and then also paradigm proposed in [40]. However, a drawback of present
adapted to distance. While the approach is very similar to the HRC implementations particularly in industrial environments
one proposed herein, to the best of the authors’ knowledge the is that the reaction in the event of an impending risk to a human
scaling factor was selected by means of heuristics, rather than worker is to stop robot motion, thus interrupting the applica-
being optimized for productivity. While this fact can be toler- tion and curtailing productivity. The proposed approach is to
ated, since the robot was proved to be able to safely interact maximize the productivity during the operation with respect to
with its human fellow co-worker, from a production perspective, safety constraints. Experiments described above have shown
there is no guarantee that the mentioned method could achieve improvement of the uptime of the collaborative applications,
the best tradeoff between safety and productivity. Moreover, in especially in the examples by moving down the elbow in case
our approach safety is considered as a hard constraint to be satis- that the worker approaches. Speed reduction or standstill is
fied, rather than a cost function to be somehow optimized, as tra- mostly sufficient, which can be automatically recovered to
ditionally conceived within the framework of artificial potential normal operation from exception. As a result, this reduces the
fields, see, e.g., [11], [12], and [39]. Finally, all the approaches frequency of unintended contacts between worker and robot,
based on potential function suffer from the major drawback of and upholds the productivity.
being sensitive to tuning parameters. In turn, in our approach,
the sole parameters to be tuned are the braking time, which is
usually known, and possibly the clearance distance, for which VII. CONCLUSION
general guidelines from safety standards can be adopted.
This paper contributes in introducing a metrics for safety
The approach discussed by Kuhn et al. in [18] consists in gen-
evaluation in human-robot collaborative manufacturing envi-
erating an augmented silhouette around the robot whose dimen-
ronments. This metrics depends on the relative distance between
sion depends on the velocity of the robot itself. This region is
the human worker and the robot, as well as on the robot itself.
generated directly in the frames of a ceiling-mounted surveil-
A control strategy, modulating the velocity of the robot on an
lance camera. While the approach is comparable to the one pre-
assigned path, has been proposed to enforce a safe HRC. Ex-
sented in this paper, there are three major differences. First, the
periments have been discussed both in case of adoption of an
approach developed here allows to systematically define the re-
open robot controller, and in case of a traditional, closed-ended,
lationship between the volume around the robot to be moni-
scenario.
tored and the velocity (magnitude and direction) of the robot
itself, also accounting for possible delays in the perception/ac-
tion toolchain. Second, no assumption has been made here on ACKNOWLEDGMENT
the safeguarding system. In particular, the KINECT camera has
been adopted within the experimental verifications, but, in prin- A. M. Zanchettin, N. M. Ceriani and P. Rocco would like to
ciple, any other kind of surveillance sensor can be used. Finally, thank Prof. R. Casagrandi for the chemical instruments needed
the property of our metrics to be affine in the robot control input for the experiments in the first validation scenario. H. Ding and
(the vector of joint velocities) allows for an easier deployment B. Matthias thank J. Heyn, J. Zhang, and M. Schipper for their
on an industrial controller. contributions to the setup of the multiple HRC assembly station.
As for commercially available solutions of HRC in indus-
10http://www.reisrobotics.com/.
trial environments, ABB SafeMove9 enables human workers
11http://www.kuka.com/.
and robots to work together without compromising on safety.
12http://www.fanucrobotics.com/.
9http://www.abb.com/. 13http://www.pilz.com/.
892 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, VOL. 13, NO. 2, APRIL 2016
Nicola Maria Ceriani was born in Milano, Italy, in Hao Ding was born in 1980. He received the B.Sc.
1986. He received the B.Sc. and the M.Sc. degrees in degree in automation from the Beijing Institute of
mechanical engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Technology, Beijing, China, in 2003, the M.Sc.
Milano, in 2009 and 2011, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in automation and robotics from Technische
degree in information technology from Politecnico di Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany, in
Milano, Milano, in 2014, with a thesis on the design 2006, and the Ph.D. degree in control and robotics
and integration of a task consistent collision avoid- from Universität Kassel, Kassel, Germany, in 2013.
ance system with an industrial robot. From 2007 to 2009, he was a Research Assistant
In 2011, he was the beneficiary of a research grant at the Chair of Automatic Control Engineering,
about the design and implementation of a control Technische Universität München, Germany. Since
system for a semi-autonomous ATV. In Winter 2012, 2011, he has been with ABB Corporate Research
he was a Researcher at the Department of Automatic Control (Reglerteknik), Germany, where he is currently a Senior Scientist and a Project Manager.
Lund University. He is now an Engineering Analyst at Tenaris Dalmine, His research interest include human-robot/machine collaboration, machinery
working on robotics and products tracking systems. safety, robotic assembly, and factory automation. He is the author of about 50
papers in international/national journals and conferences, and book chapters.
He is an independent expert on robotics for evaluation of proposals for the
European Commission.
Paolo Rocco (M'96) received the Ph.D. degree in Dr. Ding is the recipient of the EU HYCON WP2 Solar Benchmark Exercise
computer science and automation from Politecnico Award in 2006 for his work on supervisory control of a solar air-conditioning
di Milano, Milano, Italy, in 1995. system. With his work on optimizing motion of robotic manipulators in inter-
In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Georgia action with human and on optimized task distribution in mixed environments,
Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. Since he received the Best Paper Award at ICIRA in 2011 and the Best Application
1996, he has been with Politecnico di Milano, Mi- Paper Award at IEEE CASE in 2014, respectively. In 2011, he was awarded by
lano, Italy, where he is currently a Full Professor of the Chinese Government as an Outstanding Self-Financed Student Abroad.
Systems and Control, teaching also robotics courses.
He serves as Chair of the Automation and Control
Engineering B.Sc. and M.Sc. Programs. He is the
author of about 150 papers in international journals, Björn Matthias After studying physics at the Cal-
book chapters, and both international and national conferences. His research ifornia Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena,
interests include physical human-robot interaction, redundant manipulators, use CA, USA, and received the Ph.D. degree in experi-
of computer vision in robotics, control of servomechanisms, and mechatronics mental particle physics athree t Yale University, New
in general. Haven, CT, USA, in 1990.
Dr. Rocco has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON He spent just over years as a post-doc at the
ROBOTICS from 2004 to 2008. He has also been a member of the Conference University of Heidelberg, doing research on spec-
Editorial Board of the Robotics and Automation Society of the IEEE. He has troscopy of exotic atoms and on rare decays. In 1994,
been the Person-in-Charge for Politecnico di Milano in the four-year-long Eu- he joined ABB Corporate Research, Ladenburg,
ropean project ROSETTA on industrial robotics, as well as in other national and Germany, working in the area of computational
international projects. design and simulation of power electrical systems
and electrostatic paint application. Since 2001, he has been working on safety
for industrial robots and human-robot collaboration. He is active in national
and international (ISO) committees for robot safety standardization. He also
serves on the Board of Directors of the European Robotics Interest Group
euRobotics aisbl, which works with the European Commission on establishing
R&D&I priorities for Europe. His present research is focused on collaborative
small-parts assembly, on safety-related design of collaborative robots, and on
the ergonomics of the collaborative workplace.