Experiment about human multi-robot collaboration

Nowadays, industrial robotics requires that robots
and humans share the same workspace and collaborate to a
certain extent. In such a scenario, the safety is the minimum
requirement and, for this reason, many off-the-shelf collaborative
robots are now available on the market which, basically, are able
to perform a monitored stop in the case of impact.
Differently from many different works, this paper presents a
solution to human multi-robot safe interaction in which multiple
mobile manipulators are in charge of performing a cooperative
task in a workspace shared with human operators. The safety of
the interaction is assessed by a safety field that takes into account
the whole system and is general enough concerning its expression.
Based on the value of this field, the cooperative task trajectory is
properly modified so as to ensure a safe interaction while trying
to preserve as much as possible the nominal task, which is instead
completely aborted whenever the safety of the interaction cannot
be guaranteed. The solution is first designed within a centralized
architecture and, then, upon this, a distributed implementation
is presented which is shown to exhibit the same performance
as the centralized counterpart. This feature is in accordance to
the current trend of distributed manipulation so as to improve
the flexibility in new production environments.