Impact force identification in cobots: A preliminary work

Nowadays, cobots have become common in manufacturing industry collaborating with human agents and are predicted to be increasingly part of our lives. Whether it is industrial or service robots, the recent trend is to focus on what has been called human-robot collaboration (HRC). This poses a critical issue regarding the safety of human agents interacting with robot agents. Detecting a collision and executing an appropriate control strategy to reduce impact damages has been proven to be as an effective way to ensure a safe environment for human agents. This paper evaluates an approach for the complete identification of impact action in terms of point of application, intensity, and direction under some illustrative assumptions on robot geometry and system dynamics using only the sensors already present in the robot control system. Simulations have been carried out and their results suggest that the presented approach might be viable for collision detection, isolation, and identification.