Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Project Summary The goal of this project was to develop a strategy for designing intrinsically safer telerobots, haptic devices, and similar robotic manipulators that are intended to share workspaces and collaborate with humans. The notion of robots collaborating with humans (except in the tiny field of telerobotics) is a purely 1990's phenomenon. From the beginning of industrial robotics to the present, the first line of defense in robot safety has been to take all necessary measures to enforce segregation between live robots and people. Although flaws in this approach have led to some documented human fatalities, segregation is still one of the best ways to protect people from robots. But, what if you cannot cage the robot, as in the case of automatically guided vehicles (ATVs)? Or worse, what if successful task completion requires people and robots to collaborate directly in a shared workspace? If fact, market pressures are about to topple some of the barriers separating robots and people. For a variety of reasons, including Moore's Law stipulating that the price-performance of computers doubles each year, robots are suddenly becoming economically attractive in a variety of environments where collaboration with people is central. The value of the robot-person collaboration is being discovered in a variety of environments from traditional manufacturing robots which don't have the dexterity to accomplish all aspects of a task autonomously, to medical assistants and telesurgery in an operating room, to robotic sports-injury trainers. It is clear that robotics professionals must develop more comprehensive design-for-safety guidelines for the inevitable deployment of collaborative robots. We organized our analysis and development of a design methodology for human-robot safety into five objectives, documented in Sections 2 through 6 of this document. First, robot safety was characterized in terms of a concrete set of safety metrics. Second, robot performance was described by a similar set of task-related functional specifications. Third, analytical models were developed to relate robot design parameters to safety and performance variables. Fourth, design tradeoffs were identified and tools were developed as a result of the modeling efforts to guide the design of safer robots. Fifth, a methodology was proposed for the design of an intrinsically safer robot and an example given to demonstrate application of the new methodology. …
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