Superquadric obstacle modeling and a danger evaluation method with applications in safe planning for human-safe industrial robots

This paper presents a human body modeling technique, and a safe planning strategy using danger evaluation for robotic manipulators intended for interactions with humans. Such interactive robots are required to have minimum footprint on the shop floor and to be able to work in constrained areas while ensuring the safety of the humans. A new approach is proposed for generating an efficient representation of the human body by considering its dimensions, position, and orientation. This model takes advantage of superquadric functions to represent the human body more realistically than using primitive shapes. By taking advantage of this model, a new measure of danger involved in robot operation is proposed. This approach significantly improves the effectiveness of danger evaluation by considering a more precise body model. The danger index is then used as part of the path planning algorithm to guarantee the safety of operations. The method is evaluated on a CRS-F3 industrial manipulator.