Safety-oriented system in human-machine cooperative work using ER fluid and task-oriented sensing

In the near future, robots working with people or agents in the same place will be realized by the expansion of the use of remote control robots. For that reason, we need a safety system that prevents a robot from a drastic collisions with any agent in the surrounding environment. Task-oriented sensing can improve the response speed of the control system, and the ER-joint realizes high-speed responses and a force-limiting mechanism at the same time. We apply these properties to an autonomic safety mechanism to prevent collisions. Then, we prove the stability of the ER-joint in the case of normal operation by Lyapunov's direct method. We then apply the system to a micro-injector in order to test the effectiveness of the mechanism.