An Efficient Architecture Fulfilling Safety

In real-world industrial settings, human operators and robots often work closely together. In this scenario it is necessary to guarantee safety taking into account that the robot’s path sometimes can not be changed, e.g. welding task. To improve robot performance while maintaining safety standards, a two-layer safe architecture is introduced. The first layer generates joint reference velocities to preserve the task path and utilize robot redundancies for obstacle avoidance. The second layer scales these velocities to comply with ISO/TS 15066 safety regulations. The framework has been experimentally validated with a Kuka LWR4+.