Collision Detection for Industrial Collaborative Robots: A Deep Learning Approach

With increased human–robot interactions in industrial settings, a safe and reliable collision detection framework has become an indispensable element of collaborative robots. The conventional framework detects collisions by estimating collision monitoring signals with a particular type of observer, which is followed by collision decision processes. This results in unavoidable tradeoff between sensitivity to collisions and robustness to false alarms. In this study, we propose a collision detection framework (CollisionNet) based on a deep learning approach. We designed a deep neural network model to learn robot collision signals and recognize any occurrence of a collision. This data-driven approach unifies feature extraction from high-dimensional signals and the decision processes. CollisionNet eliminates heuristic and cumbersome nature of the traditional decision processes, showing high detection performance and generalization capability in real time. We verified the performance of the proposed framework through various experiments.