Making service robots human-safe

This paper first reviews the literature about the very important but neglected issue of safety in service-robots applications. Most of the few existing approaches are limited because they lack flexibility. We argue that human-tailored safety schemes are greatly needed, and propose two strategies in the line we think human-safe robots should be conceived. A fast method to derive the robot's incremental movements given a workspace force applied to the robot constitutes the basis of the robot behaviors that underlie the proposed strategies. Our simulations show that our strategies are safe, human-friendly and exhibit real-time performance. Finally, we discuss the many ways in which our work can be extended.