Real-Time Control of Robot Arms for Safe Human-Robot Coexistence

In the past years, manufacturers have been moving from automated mass production to automated mass customization, where robots share a workspace with humans in constantly changing scenarios. To avoid collisions with humans and the environment while ensuring efficient task realization,
we introduce a computationally efficient control scheme that relies on the Explicit Reference Governor (ERG) formalism to enforce input and state constraints in real-time. The resulting constrained control method can steer the robot arm to the desired end-effector pose (or a steady-state admissible approximation thereof) in the presence of actuator saturation, limited joint ranges, speed limits, static obstacles, and humans. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is shown with experimental validations on the Franka Emika Panda robot arm.