Efficient ISO/TS 15066 Compliance through Model Predictive Control

In the actual industrial scenarios, human operators and robots work together sharing the workspace. Such proximity requires special attention in ensuring safety for the human operator, which is often translated in collision avoidance behaviour or high speed reduction. Adhering safety however is not the only aspect that must be taken into account. For many tasks, such as welding, it is crucial to ensure that the robot performs exactly the planned path. To optimize robot performance while complying with safety regulations, this work introduces a novel optimal nonlinear control problem. It prioritizes path preservation, exploiting redundancy to minimize task execution time, while explicitly adhering to the constraints imposed by ISO/TS 15066. To achieve high-performance outcomes, the control problem is addressed using the Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach. The proposed strategy has been experimentally validated in both simulations and a real-world industrial task involving a Kuka LWR4+ robot.