Trajectory planning of soft link robots with improved intrinsic safety

Abstract For human-robot cooperation, intrinsic safety approaches aim at reducing the energy involved in the motion of the robotic system and at increasing the system compliance in order to reduce the risk of injury in case of an unexpected collision. Robots based on lightweight and inherently flexible links exhibit attractive features in this context but the control of their motion then leads to a tremendous challenge. This paper presents a novel trajectory planning method for 3D robots which aims at improving the tracking accuracy despite the link flexibility.