Experimental characterization of collaborative robot collisions

Human-robot collaboration can include physical contact between the human and moving robot. Thus, the contact itself must be understood in detail, so as to consider it properly in a risk assessment. This approach pursued in the EU-FP7 project ROSETTA is toward gaining understanding of low-level mechanical impacts on parts of the human body through use and further development of finite-element models of the human body parts. A reference test setup has been developed to characterize robot impacts on an instrumented arrangement with defined inertial and compliance properties. Simulations of the test setup serve to verify the tool chain used and can subsquently be seen to validate and calibrate the results of simulations of impacts on the human body. The test setup used is presented and results are shown and discussed to draw conclusions on the relevance of this approach for the characterization of collaborative robots.