Risked-based design for the physical human-robot interaction (pHRI): an overview

Abstract

Collaboration and sharing workspace between human and robots has turned into a challenge that has to be taken into account in many industrial domains, including the process industry. In this study, literature related to risk-based safety system design is reviewed as well as relevant research of control design for safety issues. The paper mainly presents two key contributions. 1) planning for safety: risk-based safety analysis methodologies are reviewed to analyze current methods for identifying the potential risks caused by abnormal operation and failures in the human-robot interaction environment. The risk assessment methodologies are including not only functional risk analysis, but also human reliability analysis. The results from risk evaluation will help making HRI safety strategies which are series decision makings to support the further engineering design of a pHRI safety system. 2) Control design system for achieving safety: to reach a comprehensive safety system design and limit accidents in the human-robot interaction environment, four scenarios are taken into consideration: proximity detection, collision avoidance, docking and compliance control. Current control techniques in each domain to guarantee the safety of system are reviewed. Finally, most common used methods in the above-mentioned areas are introduced and their performance is discussed.