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

The automation of driving tasks is of increasing interest for highway traffic management. The emerging technologies of global positioning and intervehicular wireless communications, combined with in-vehicle computation and sensing capabilities, can potentially provide remarkable improvements in safety and efficiency. We address the problem of designing intelligent in-tersections, where traffic lights and stop signs are removed, and cars negotiate the intersection through an interaction of centralized and distributed decision making. Intelligent intersections are representative of complex hybrid systems that are increasingly of interest, where the challenge is to design tractable distributed algorithms that guarantee safety and provide good performance. Systems of automatically driven vehicles will need an under lying collision avoidance system with provable safety properties to be acceptable. This condition raises several challenges. We need to ensure perpetual collision avoidance so that cars do not get into future problematic positions to avoid an immediate collision. The architecture needs to allow distributed freedom of action to cars yet should guard against worst-case behavior of other cars to guarantee collision avoidance. The algorithms should be tractable both computationally and in information requirements and robust to uncertainties in sensing and communication. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid architecture with an appropriate interplay between centralized coordination and distributed freedom of action. The approach is built around a core where each car has an infinite horizon contingency plan, which is updated at each sampling instant and distributed by the cars, in a computationally tractable manner. We also define a dynamically changing partial-order relation between cars, which specifies, for each car, a set of cars whose worst-case behaviors it should guard against. The architecture is hybrid, involving a centralized component that coordinates intersection traversals. We prove the safety and liveness of the overall scheme. The mathematical challenge of accurately quantifying performance remains as a difficult challenge; therefore, we conduct a simulation study that shows the benefits over stop signs and traffic lights. It is hoped that our effort can provide methodologies for the design of tractable solutions for complex distributed systems that require safety and liveness guarantees.

http://cesg.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ps_files/10-11-07-IEEE-TVT-Kowshik-Intersections.pdf

Provable Systemwide Safety in Intelligent Intersections

A Collision Warning System for rear-end collision: a driving simulator study

Cooperative vehicular communication systems are being developed to improve traffic safety and efficiency through the wireless exchange of information between vehicles and between vehicles and infrastructure units. The future deployment of cooperative active safety applications requires their prior extensive testing due to their critical nature and strict quality of service requirements. Such testing should consider challenging driving and communications conditions that could significantly impact the applications' effectiveness. In this context, this paper presents a cooperative communications testing platform implemented to evaluate the operation and effectiveness of cooperative active safety applications under challenging driving and communications conditions. The paper also reports the results of an extensive testing campaign that reveals potential limitations of cooperative technologies and applications, and discusses possible countermeasures to overcome the applications' effectiveness degradation under adverse operating conditions.

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Cooperative vehicle-to-vehicle active safety testing under challenging conditions

A set of metrics is proposed that evaluates speed and separation monitoring efficacy in industrial robot environments in terms of the quantification of safety and the effects on productivity. The collision potential is represented by separation metrics and sensor uncertainty based on perceived noise and bounding region radii. In the event of a bounding region collision between a robot and an obstacle during algorithm evaluation, the severity of the separation failure is reported as a percentage of volume penetration.

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Performance Metrics of Speed and Separation Monitoring in Shared Workspaces

Collision avoidance systems (CAS) are an emerging automotive safety technology that assists drivers in avoiding collisions. They monitor the dynamic traffic and vehicle information in real time and assess the current threat level to decide if warnings should be issued to the driver or automatic braking is needed to avoid collisions. Several measures have previously been defined for threat assessment with various warning and overriding algorithms proposed. A new threat assessment measure, time-to-last-second-braking (Tlsb) is proposed in this paper and its advantages over previous measures are discussed. It directly quantifies the danger or threat level of the current dynamic situation objectively as well as assesses the urgency level for the required evasive action, e.g., braking. It is in agreement with human natural judgment of the urgency and severity of threats. Furthermore, new warning and overriding criteria are proposed based on the new Tlsb measure, providing more appropriate warning and more effective override timing

K. Grote

Papers

A new threat assessment measure for collision avoidance systems