Benjamin Navarro

An ISO10218-compliant adaptive damping controller for safe physical human-robot interaction

In human-robot interaction, the robot must behave safely, especially when an operator is present in its workspace. Even higher safety levels must be attained when physical contact occurs between the two. To this end, standards such as the ISO10218 define the requirements for a robot to be considered safe for interaction with human operators in an industrial environment. In this paper, we propose an adaptive damping controller that fulfills the ISO10218 requirements by limiting the tool velocity, power and contact force online (and only when needed). The controller is experimentally validated on a hand-arm robotic system, in a mock-up collaborative application. For the hand, safe interaction is enhanced by using tactile sensing, both to regulate grasp forces and to provide an intuitive interface for the operator.

A Novel EMG Interface for Individuals With Tetraplegia to Pilot Robot Hand Grasping

This paper introduces a new human-machine interface for individuals with tetraplegia. We investigated the feasibility of piloting an assistive device by processing supra-lesional muscle responses online. The ability to voluntarily contract a set of selected muscles was assessed in five spinal cord-injured subjects through electromyographic (EMG) analysis. Two subjects were also asked to use the EMG interface to control palmar and lateral grasping of a robot hand. The use of different muscles and control modalities was also assessed. These preliminary results open the way to new interface solutions for high-level spinal cord-injured patients.

OpenPHRI: an open-source library for safe physical human-robot interaction

OpenPHRI is a C++/Python general-purpose software scheme with several built-in safety measures designed to ease robot programming for physical human?robot interaction (pHRI) and collaboration. Aside from providing common functionalities, the library can be easily customized and enhanced thanks to the projects open-source nature. The OpenPHRI framework consists of a two-layer damping controller, depicted in Figure 1. This allows the user to provide compliance and other safety features at both the joint and task levels, depending on the application.