An Optimal Human-Based Control Approach for Mobile Human-Robot Collaboration

In collaborative robotic applications, human and robot have to cooperate in executing a common job. During the collaboration, the operator’s experience in the job is of paramount importance. Furthermore, it is essential to ensure that the two agents are always close enough to perform the assigned task, without jeopardizing the safety of the operator. In this paper, we propose an integrated architecture that allows the human operator to drive the collaboration based on its position. The robot is forced to stay close to the human during the execution of the task, but without colliding. Moreover the architecture is capable of changing online the size of the collaborative area, making it suitable for most of the collaborative jobs. The proposed approach is validated on a UR10e mobile manipulator which has been mounted on a MIR100 collaborative platform.