Bi-objective Motion Planning Approach for Safe Motions: Application to a Collaborative Robot

International audienceAccepted version freely available here: [ http://bit.ly/2qlyjJ6 ] Online version via SpringerLink: [ http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10846-019-01110-1 ] Abstract: This paper presents a new bi-objective safety-oriented path planning strategy for robotic manipulators. Integrated into a sampling-based algorithm, our approach can successfully enhance the task safety by guiding the expansion of the path towards the safest configurations. Our safety notion consists of avoiding dangerous situations, e.g. being very close to the obstacles, human awareness, e.g. being as much as possible in the human vision field, as well as ensuring human safety by being as far as possible from human with hierarchical priority between human body parts. Experimental validations are conducted in simulation and on the real Baxter research robot. They revealed the efficiency of the proposed method, mainly in the case of a collaborative robot sharing the workspace with humans

Safety-oriented path planning for articulated robots

SUMMARYThis work presents an approach to motion planning for robotic manipulators that aims at improving path quality in terms of safety. Safety is explicitly assessed using the quantity calleddanger field. The measure of safety can easily be embedded into a heuristic function that guides the exploration of the free configuration space. As a result, the resulting path is likely to have substantially higher safety margin when compared to one obtained by regular planning algorithms. To this end, four planning algorithms have been proposed. The first planner is based on volume trees comprised of bubbles of free configuration space, while the remaining ones represent modifications of classical sampling-based algorithms. Several numerical case studies are carried out to validate and compare the performance of the presented algorithms with respect to classical planners. The results indicate significantly lower danger metric for paths obtained by safety-oriented planners even with some decrease in running time.</jats:p