Session Overview Physical Human-Robot Integration and Haptics

Machines and robots in the near future will share environments, and often come directly in touch with humans. This is to happen in several applications domains, including domestic applications (domotics), entertainment, assistance , cooperative manipulation tasks, teleoperation, human augmentation, haptic interfaces and exoskeletons. Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) poses many challenges, which can be summarized by the dichotomy safety vs. performance. The first and foremost concern, indeed, is that the robot must not hurt humans, directly nor indirectly, in regular operations nor in failures. Second, the machine is expected to perform swiftly and effectively its tasks in the service to humans. As a consequence of this priority inversion, machines interacting with humans have different requirements than those currently met in industrial robots: while accuracy is less demanding, safety of operations is a must. Furthermore , the definition of performance is to be rethought, being sometimes the machine intended for quite different tasks than conventional industrial robots. This session was designed to explore the safety and performance aspects of pHRI. The first paper, A Unified Passivity Based Control Framework for Position, Torque and Impedance Control of Flexible Joint Robots by Alin Albu-Schäffer, Christian Ott and Gerd Hirzinger, discusses how to effectively control a high-performance robot arm designed to minimize risks of impact with humans by reducing its inertia, and allowing joint compliance. Compare this with the traditional approach of controlling stiff and heavy arms so as to appear compliant, and consider the degree of fault tolerance of the two approaches.