A planning method for safe interaction between human arms and robot manipulators

This paper presents a planning method based on mapping moving obstacles into C-space for safe interaction between human arms and robot manipulators. In pre-processing phase, a hybrid distance metric is defined to select neighboring sampled nodes in C-space to construct a roadmap. Then, two kinds of mapping are constructed to determine invalid and dangerous edges in the roadmap for each basic cell decomposed in workspace. For updating the roadmap when an obstacle is moving, basic cells covering the obstacle's surfaces are mapped into the roadmap by using new positions of the surfaces points sampled on the obstacle. In query phase, in order to predict and avoid coming collisions and reach the goal efficiently, an interaction strategy with six kinds of planning actions of searching, updating, walking, waiting, dodging and pausing are designed. Simulated experiments show that the proposed method is efficient for safe interaction between two working robot manipulators and two randomly moving human arms.