Safety is an important consideration in human-robot interactions (HRI). Robots can perform powerful movements that can cause hazards to humans surrounding them. To prevent accidents, it is important to identify sources of potential harm, to determine which of the persons in the robot's vicinity may be in greatest peril and to assess the type of injuries the robot may cause to this person. This survey starts with a review of the safety issues in industrial settings, where robots manipulate dangerous tools and move with extreme rapidity and force. We then move to covering issues related to the growing numbers of autonomous mobile robots that operate in crowded (human-inhabited) environments. We discuss the potential benefits of fully autonomous cars on safety on roads and for pedestrians. Lastly, we cover safety issues related to assistive robots.

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Safety issues in human-robot interactions

Caregiving role in human–robot interaction: A study of the mediating effects of perceived benefit and social presence

– The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the interdisciplinary research field, autonomous industrial mobile manipulation (AIMM), with an emphasis on physical implementations and applications., – Following an introduction to AIMM, this paper investigates the missing links and gaps between the research and developments efforts and the real‐world application requirements, in order to bring the AIMM technology from laboratories to manufacturing environments. The investigation is based on 12 general application requirements for robotics: sustainability, configuration, adaptation, autonomy, positioning, manipulation and grasping, robot‐robot interaction, human‐robot interaction, process quality, dependability, and physical properties., – The concise yet comprehensive review provides both researchers (academia) and practitioners (industry) with a quick and gentle overview of AIMM. Furthermore, the paper identifies key open issues and promising research directions to realize real‐world integration and maturation of the AIMM technology., – This paper reviews the interdisciplinary research field, autonomous industrial mobile manipulation (AIMM).

Autonomous industrial mobile manipulation (AIMM): past, present and future

This paper presents a multi-sensor based generic approach to opening doors for a dexterous robot Once the handle has been located by a computer vision algorithm and properly grasped, we are able to open doors without using a model or other prior knowledge of the door geometry This is done by combining the sensor information of both a force-torque sensor in the robot wrist and a tactile sensor matrix in the robot gripper itself Our experimental results show that the combination of both sensors achieves the most successful way to open the door

Opening a door with a humanoid robot using multi-sensory tactile feedback

Technological advances are being made to assist humans in performing ordinary tasks in everyday settings. A key issue is the interaction with objects of varying size, shape, and degree of mobility. Autonomous assistive robots must be provided with the ability to process visual data in real time so that they can react adequately for quickly adapting to changes in the environment. Reliable object detection and recognition is usually a necessary early step to achieve this goal. In spite of significant research achievements, this issue still remains a challenge when real-life scenarios are considered. In this article, we present a vision system for assistive robots that is able to detect and recognize objects from a visual input in ordinary environments in real time. The system computes color, motion, and shape cues, combining them in a probabilistic manner to accurately achieve object detection and recognition, taking some inspiration from vision science. In addition, with the purpose of processing the input visual data in real time, a graphical processing unit (GPU) has been employed. The presented approach has been implemented and evaluated on a humanoid robot torso located at realistic scenarios. For further experimental validation, a public image repository for object recognition has been used, allowing a quantitative comparison with respect to other state-of-the-art techniques when realworld scenes are considered. Finally, a temporal analysis of the performance is provided with respect to image resolution and the number of target objects in the scene.

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Object Detection and Recognition for Assistive Robots: Experimentation and Implementation

This paper describes the UJI librarian robot, a mobile manipulator that is able to autonomously locate a book in an ordinary library, and grasp it from a bookshelf, by using eye-in-hand stereo vision and force sensing. The robot is only provided with the book code, a library map and some knowledge about its logical structure and takes advantage of the spatio-temporal constraints and regularities of the environment by applying disparate techniques such as stereo vision, visual tracking, probabilistic matching, motion estimation, multisensor-based grasping, visual servoing and hybrid control, in such a way that it exhibits a robust and dependable performance. The system has been tested, and experimental results show how it is able to robustly locate and grasp a book in a reasonable time without human intervention.

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The UJI librarian robot

This paper describes how the use of panoramic cameras can dramatically simplify safety issues for a robot arm moving in close proximity to human beings, since they can simultaneously observe a 360deg field of view. We present in this context an approach to visual servoing in which both the manipulator as well as any other moving object are tracked. Reliability and robustness are enhanced by adaptative background modelling and global illumination change detection.

Safety for a robot arm moving amidst humans by using panoramic vision

This paper presents a modular control architecture that enables a mobile manipulator to be compliant and perform manipulation tasks in partially known everyday human environments. An impedance velocity/force controller that allows the execution of a great variety of tasks under the Task Frame Formalism (TFF) is implemented.

Tasks are represented as a net of basic abilities which are performed by the robot using the impedance controller. Mechanisms for switching between abilities according to the robot's perceptual state are defined.

We show the validity of our approach on the UJI Service Robot, making it to perform a common daily task such as opening a door. Finally, we apply this framework to make progress on the new version of the UJI Librarian Robot, making a great step forward in the way the robot manipulates books.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0263574706003304

Towards multipurpose autonomous manipulation with the uji service robot

One of the key issues in new flexible manufacturing set-ups is how the robot system interacts with its environment, specially when people are involved in those interactions. Thus, in order to guarantee safety without restricting robot system autonomy and flexibility, a novel, robust visual application to detect and track people around a robotic system is presented here. First, a new background maintance algorithm is applied in order to adapt to different unexpected changes in the scene. Then, after applying a calibration method, the estimation of the position between the system and the detected objects must be done by using an additional method. This application has been tested and compared with the previous approaches by demonstrating its improvement over them, as it will be shown in the results section.

Safety for human-robot interaction in dynamic environments

Micro-robotics calls for the development of tracking systems in order to study the movement of each micro-robot in a colony to answer questions about what they are doing and where and when they act (see Fig. 1). Moreover, micro-robots can be used to emulate social insect behaviour (Camazine et al., 2001) and study them through tracking experiments involving several miniature robots on a desktop table. Thus, principles of self-organization in these colonies, which were studied so far by analysis of a tremendous amount of insect trajectories and manual event counting, are now better understood by biologists thanks to robotics research.

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Ester Martínez

Papers

The UJI librarian robot

Safety for a robot arm moving amidst humans by using panoramic vision

Towards multipurpose autonomous manipulation with the uji service robot

Safety for human-robot interaction in dynamic environments

Visual Analysis of Robot and Animal Colonies