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2011 11th International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems Oct.

26-29, 2011 in KINTEX, Gyeonggi-do, Korea

Experimental result of the collision detection of a robot manipulator


Chanhun Park1 , Jin Ho Kyung2 and Dong-IL Park2
1

Robotics & Mechatronics Research Center, Nano Convergence & Systems Research Division, Daejeon, Korea
(Tel : +82-42-868-7127; E-mail: chpark@kimm.re.kr)

Robotics & Mechatronics Research Center, Nano Convergence & Systems Research Division, Daejeon, Korea ( Tel : +82-42-868-7885; E-mail: jhkyung@kimm.re.kr ) ( Tel : +82-42-868-7941; E-mail: parkstar@kimm.re.kr )

Abstract: An industrial manipulator has been developed. The purpose of the development of the manipulator was the easy and safe human-robot cooperation. Most of the industrial robot manipulator can harm the operator near the robot systems when the manipulator is doing cooperative motion with the human operator. But the developed manipulator is safe even when the manipulator is working in the workspace shared with the human operator. In this experiment, the experimental results for the safety of the developed manipulator will be shown. Keywords: Safety, Safe cooperation, Collision detection, Collision avoidanc.

1. INTRODUCTION
Human-robot cooperation is one of the efficient ways to enhance the performance of the process in the automated production lines [1]-[5]. Human-robot cooperation is one of the most interesting research parts, and the authors has been studied on the direct teaching method to implement the intuitive human-robot cooperation [6]-[7]. But if the robot and the operator are in the same workspace for the cooperative motion, it is dangerous because most of the industrial robot manipulator can harm the operator near the robot systems when the manipulator is doing cooperative motion with the human operator. But the developed manipulator is safe even when the manipulator is working in the workspace shared with the human operator because it has a joint torque sensor to detect the collision between the robot and the human operator. In this paper, the research results on the development of an intelligent safe robot with joint torque sensors are introduced. And also, the experimental results for the safety of the developed manipulator will be shown.

between the robot manipulator and the human operator. In the developed manipulator, the robot manipulator has a safe torque sensor at each joints. Fig 2 shows the developed actuation module with a safe torque sensor. The actuation module is composed of a BLDC motor, a harmonic drive, an absolute encoder, a magnetic brake and a safe torque sensor

Fig. 2 The developed actuation module equipped with the safe joint torque sensor. The safe torque sensor is able to measure the torque induced in the direction of the rotational axis of the BLDC motor. Fig. 3 shows the developed safe torque sensor.

Fig. 3 The developed safe torque sensor. Fig. 1 The developed robot manipulator with joint torque sensor. The mechanical structure of the safe torque sensor is deformed by all the forces and torque loaded on it. It is impossible the joint torque sensor give its response only for the joint rotational torque. In this reason, the mechanical deformation of the safe torque sensor is protected by the cross roller bearing as shown in Fig. 4.

2. THE MANIPULATOR WITH THE ACTUATION MODULES WITH SAFETY TORQUE SENSORS
There may be many solutions to detect collision

978-89-93215-03-8 98560/11/$15 $ ICROS

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Fig. 4 The developed actuation module with a safe torque sensor.

3. EXPERIMENT OF THE COLLISION DETECTION


The left of Fig. 4 shows the kinematic structure of the developed manipulator with the actuation module equipped with the safe joint torque sensor. It has two 6-DOF force-torque sensor on the end-effector which are used to teach the manipulator using the direct teaching algorithm. At the every joint, it has safe torque sensor to detect the collision between the manipulator and the human operator. In this chapter, the experimental results will be introduced while the manipulator moves the configuration of the left of Fig. 4 to the configuration of the right of the Fig. 4. In this process, the human will contact the manipulator and the manipulator will detect the contact and it can stop the motion for the safety Fig. 5 The human operator hits the manipulator to test the collision detection performance. In this test, the human operator's contact force is small, about 3-4N. The human operator hits the manipulator 12 times. In this process, the robot controller computes the residual torque using the collision detection algorithm proposed in [8]. The lowpass filter gain of [8] was set 20 for this experiment. Figure 6 shows the result of the collision detection experiment. The vertical axis means the Resisual torque (N-m) and the horizontal axis means the sampling counts. You can see when the collision occur. High value of the residual means the collision occur. In the ideal case, if the collision does not occur, the residual value has to be near zero. But in the real case, the dynamics parameter is not perfectly know and the precision of the safe torque sensor is not perfect. So, as shown in Fig 6, the residual value for the non-contact case is not near zero. Thus the threshold value has to be set for the collision detection. In this experiment, the value was 9.0.

Fig. 4 The kinematic structure and the motion under the collision detection. To define the robot dynamic characteristics, well-known 6-DOF robot dynamic equation is used. The dynamic parameter was got using the solid-model files with the density information. To detect the collision, the well-know algorithm, "Residual observer"[8] is used. In the process of the motion in Fig 4, the human operator hits the robot manipulator to test the collision detection performance, as shown in Fig 5. Fig. 6 The experimental results on the collision test experiment.

4. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the developed robot manipulator for safe human-robot cooperation was introduced. It has the developed actuator module with a safe torque sensor to detect the collision between the robot manipulator and

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the human operator. And also, the experimental results was introduce to show the collision detection result. In the experiment, the human operator hits the manipulator while the manipulator is in the movement and the robot controller detect the contact using the residual observer algorithm [8].

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H. Kazerooni, Human/robot interaction via the transfer of power and information signals - part I. Dynamics and control analysis, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1632 ~ 1640 (1989) R. Schraft, C. Meyer, C. Parlitz and E. Helms, PowerMate A safe and intuitive robot assistant for handling and assembly tasks, Proc. Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Barcelona, pp. 4074-4079 (2005) E. Helms, R. Schraft and M. Hagele, Rob@work: Robot assistant in industrial environments, Proc. 11th IEEE Int. Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, pp399-404 (2002) G. Grunwald, G. Schreiber, A. AlbuSchaffer and G. Hirzinger, Programming by touch: the different way of human-robot interaction, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 659-666 (2003) T. Tsumugiwa, R. Yokogawa and K. Hara, Variable impedance control based on estimation of human arm stiffness for human-robot cooperative calligraphic task, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Washington. DC, pp. 644-650 (2002)
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C. Park, K. Park, Design and kinematics analysis of the dual arm robot manipulator for precision assembly, IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN 2008), pp.430 435, Daejeon, Korea, July 2008. A. D. Luca, Collision Detection and Safe Reaction with the DLR-III Lightweight Manipulator Arm, Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp.1623 ~ 1630, Octorber 9-15, 2006, Beijing, China.

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