Safe and collision-tolerant hybrid high-speed collaborative robots

Traditional caged industrial robots exhibit high speed performance,
but do not allow safe and robust interaction with their environment.
Their counterpart, collaborative robots (cobots), do allow safe
interactions but lack the high performance. This project wants to
bridge the gap between high-speed motion and collaboration with
humans to address the ever-increasing demand for flexibility in
production. To that end we want to design safe and collision-tolerant
high-speed cobots. We will first push the working speed of cobots in
collaborative mode with flexible links. Instead of considering classical
rectangular shaped link designs, axisymmetric links will be studied,
as they offer a far more interesting perspective on safety. To contain
the undesired side-effects of the link flexibility we will investigate a
strain-based control strategy. Secondly, we will push the collision
tolerance of today’s high-speed caged robots. We want to protect
multi-DOF articulated robot arms by designing overload clutches that
allow to rapidly reduce the inertia of the moving robot. This, together
with collision detection algorithms. Finally, we will integrate the
flexible links and overload clutches to build hybrid high-speed
collaborative robots. The new robots will be benchmarked against
existing state-of-the-art robots/cobots in terms of speed, collision
tolerance and safety, both numerically and experimentally