Q2. What aspects of the design of a robot should be considered?
To increase robot safety, all aspects of manipulator design, including mechanics, electronics, and software, should be considered.
Q3. Why is the operating system of a control architecture for pHRI needed to run in real-?
Due to the need for continuous monitoring the environment and robot operation, as well as for on-line changes in planning Cartesian (and stiffness) trajectories, the operating system of a control architecture for pHRI must run in ‘‘real-time’’.
Q4. What is the need for a inverse kinematics system?
If the modification to the trajectories are given in the operational space, there is the need for an appropriate inverse kinematics system to give the reference values for the velocity/force controllers of the manipulator, possibly considering kinematic redundancy and/or dynamic issues.
Q5. What are the common criteria for torso injuries?
For torso injuries, the available criteria can be generally divided into four groups: acceleration based criteria, force based criteria, compression based criteria, and soft tissue based criteria.
Q6. What are the main reasons for the expansion of robots into domestic environments?
teleassistance and the use of computers and devices for remote medical care pave the way to the future use of robots in domestic environments.
Q7. What is the approach to gain performance for guaranteed safety?
An approach to gain performance for guaranteed safety joint actuation is to allow the passive compliance of transmission to vary during the execution of tasks.
Q8. How can a robot be able to handle unexpected collisions?
In the case of robotic systems interacting with humans, an intrinsically safe interaction and high tolerance to unexpected collisions can be guaranteed by imposing a suitable programmable compliant behavior of the robotic system, e.g., via impedance control strategies.
Q9. Why is the extension of application domains for robotics growing?
The extension of application domains for robotics, from factories to human environments, is growing, due to the elderly-dominated scenario of most industrialized countries, the desire of automatizing common daily tasks, and the lack or high cost of local human expertise.
Q10. What is the main solution for reducing the instantaneous severity of impacts?
The main solution for reducing the instantaneous severity of impacts is to pursue a mechanical design that reduces manipulator link inertia and weight by using lightweight but stiff materials, complemented by the presence of compliant components in the structure.
Q11. What is the main problem for the introduction of robots in unstructured environment?
One major problem for the introduction of robots (in particular with mobile base) in unstructured environment is the possibility to rely on dependable sensors.
Q12. What is the solution to guarantee the safety properties of a robot?
a solution to guarantee the safety properties is to integrate in the architecture a module that formally checks the validity of the low-level commands sent to the physical system and prevents the robot from entering an unsafe state.
Q13. What is the way to measure contact forces in a robot?
Note that, a possible way to measure contact forces occurring in any part of a serial robot manipulator is to provide the robot with joint torque sensors.
Q14. What is the role of fault detection in the robotic system?
The robotic system has to be monitored during its normal working conditions so as to detect the occurrence of failures (fault detection), recognize their location and type (fault isolation), as well as their time evolution (fault identification).
Q15. What is the common approach to reactive motion planning?
Several reactive motion planning approaches exist in this context, mostly based on artificial potential fields [36] and their algorithmic or heuristic variations.
Q16. What are the three types of faults that can affect the robot?
These can be very broadly described in terms of three non-disjoint fault classes:• physical (or internal) faults, including both natural hardware faults and physical effects due to the environment (damage of mechanical parts, actuators and/or sensors faults, power supply failures, control unit hardware/software faults, radiation, electromagnetic interference, heat, etc.); • interaction (or external) faults, including issues related to human-to-robot and robot-to-robot cooperation, robustness issues with respect to operation in an open, unstructured environment (such as sudden environmental changes and disturbances not usually acting during the normal system operation or exceeding their normal limits), and malicious interference with the robot’s operation; • development faults, which may be introduced, usually accidentally, during the design or implementation of the hardware and software components of the robot.
Q17. What is the definition of a robot manipulator under impedance control?
A robot manipulator under impedance control is described by an equivalent mass–spring–damper system, with the contact force as input (impedance may vary in the various task space directions, typically in a nonlinear and coupled way).