Comparison of Collision Detection Techniques for High–Speed Industrial Robot Actuators with Overload Clutch

High-speed industrial robots can cause severe damage in the event of a collision. In order to deploy them in unstructured environments, they require overload protection and sensitive collision detection. A qualitative and quantitative comparison of different detection techniques is presented based on high-speed collision experiments. A high-speed industrial robot actuator with overload clutch was instrumented with various sensors for this purpose. Limit switches and secondary encoders required the clutch to decouple prior to detection. Proprioceptive techniques were successfully implemented but showed lower sensitivity compared to accelerometer based collision detection.