SERoCS: Safe and Efficient Robot Collaborative Systems for Next Generation Intelligent Industrial Co-Robots

Human-robot collaborations have been recognized as an essential component for future factories. It remains challenging to properly design the behavior of those co-robots. Those robots operate in dynamic uncertain environment with limited computation capacity. The design objective is to maximize their task efficiency while guaranteeing safety. This paper discusses a set of design principles of a safe and efficient robot collaboration system (SERoCS) for the next generation co-robots, which consists of robust cognition algorithms for environment monitoring, efficient task planning algorithms for reference generations, and safe motion planning and control algorithms for safe human-robot interactions. The proposed SERoCS will address the design challenges and significantly expand the skill sets of the co-robots to allow them to work safely and efficiently with their human counterparts. The development of SERoCS will create a significant advancement toward adoption of co-robots in various industries. The experiments validate the effectiveness of SERoCS.