Despite the many advances in collaborative robotics, collaborative robot control laws remain similar to
the ones used in more standard industrial robots, significantly reducing the capabilities of the robot when in proximity to
a human. Improving the efficiency of collaborative robots requires revising the control approaches and modulating online
and in real-time the low-level control of the robot to strictly ensure the safety of the human while guaranteeing efficient
task realization. In this work, an openly simple and fast optimization based joint velocity controller is proposed which
modulates the joint velocity constraints based on the robot’s braking capabilities and the separation distance. The proposed
controller is validated on the 7 degrees-of-freedom Franka Emika Panda collaborative robot.