Related papers: Safe Interactive Industrial Robots using Jerk-base…

Robots that interact with humans or perform delicate manipulation tasks must exhibit compliance. However, most commercial manipulators are rigid and suffer from significant friction, limiting end-effector tracking accuracy in…

In industrial applications, complex tasks require human collaboration since the robot doesn't have enough dexterity. However, the robots are still implemented as tools and not as collaborative intelligent systems. To ensure safety in the…

Designing controllers that accomplish tasks while guaranteeing safety constraints remains a significant challenge. We often want an agent to perform well in a nominal task, such as environment exploration, while ensuring it can avoid unsafe…

Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…

Robots can influence people to accomplish their tasks more efficiently: autonomous cars can inch forward at an intersection to pass through, and tabletop manipulators can go for an object on the table first. However, a robot's ability to…

Robots such as autonomous vehicles and assistive manipulators are increasingly operating in dynamic environments and close physical proximity to people. In such scenarios, the robot can leverage a human motion predictor to predict their…

Control systems are critical to modern technological infrastructure, spanning industries from aerospace to healthcare. This survey explores the landscape of safe robot learning, investigating methods that balance high-performance control…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in complex and continuous robotic tasks, however, safe exploration has been one of the main challenges, especially in contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured…

This paper addresses the problem of computing optimal impedance schedules for legged locomotion tasks involving complex contact interactions. We formulate the problem of impedance regulation as a trade-off between disturbance rejection and…

Physical human-robot collaboration requires strict safety guarantees since robots and humans work in a shared workspace. This letter presents a novel control framework to handle safety-critical position-based constraints for human-robot…

The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the…

As factories continue to evolve into collaborative spaces with multiple robots working together with human supervisors in the loop, ensuring safety for all actors involved becomes critical. Currently, laser-based light curtain sensors are…

Provable safety is one of the most critical challenges in automated driving. The behavior of numerous traffic participants in a scene cannot be predicted reliably due to complex interdependencies and the indiscriminate behavior of humans.…

Within a robot autonomy stack, the planner and controller are typically designed separately, and serve different purposes. As such, there is often a diffusion of responsibilities when it comes to ensuring safety for the robot. We propose…

Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…

Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings. In this…

Action anticipation, intent prediction, and proactive behavior are all desirable characteristics for autonomous driving policies in interactive scenarios. Paramount, however, is ensuring safety on the road --- a key challenge in doing so is…

In recent years, advanced model-based and data-driven control methods are unlocking the potential of complex robotics systems, and we can expect this trend to continue at an exponential rate in the near future. However, ensuring safety with…

In recent years, the focus on developing robot manipulators has shifted towards prioritizing safety in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Impedance control is a typical approach for interaction control in collaboration tasks. However, such a…

Safety for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is a major concern for all application domains. While current standardization for industrial robot applications provide safety constraints that address the onset of pain in blunt impacts,…