Contactless Control of a Kinematically Redundant Serial Manipulator Using Tomographic Sensors

For intelligent robots sharing their workspace with humans, a reliable robot perception is mandatory. Moreover, the ease of interaction between a human and a robot in a shared workspace is indispensable. We propose a touchless motion guidance based on 2-D spatial information from a capacitive tomographic perception sensor for a kinematically redundant serial manipulator. The motion guidance combined with the well-deployed joint redundancy enables the robot to react on the input of the human in a certain manner, e.g., move out of the way in a certain direction of humans sharing the same workspace while the robot operation of task fulfillment is not affected. We evaluate the position accuracy of the tomographic sensor and end effector to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach for a human hand approaching the sensor front end with a speed up to 0.3 m/s.