Collaborative Robot Safety for Human-Robot Interaction in Domestic Simulated Environments

Abstract

Human-robot interactions carry several challenges, the most important being the risk of injury to the human. In industrial robotic systems, robots are mostly caged and isolated from humans in a safety guard environment. However, as time has passed, the use of domestic robots has emerged, leading to a high need in research on robot safety in domestic settings. Human-Robot collaboration is still in an initial stage; thus, safety assessments in domestic environments are critical in the field of collaborative robots or cobots, with simulations being the first stage of research. In this study, a preliminary investigation on the simulation of human’s safety throughout human-robot interactions in home surroundings with no safety fence is presented. A simulation model is designed and developed with Gazebo in the Robot Operating System, ROS-based, to simulate the human-robot interaction. In the robot trajectory, safety interaction can be simulated. In one example, the robot’s speed can be reduced before a collision with a human about to happen, and it can be minimized the risk of the collision or reduce the damage of the risk. After the successful simulation, this can be applied to the real robot in a domestic working environment.