Safe Collaborative Robotic Manipulators

Collaborative industrial manipulators are ushering a new era in flexible manufacturing, where robots and humans are allowed to coexist and work side by side. However, various challenges still persist in achieving full human robot collaboration on the factory floor. In this thesis two main challenges - safety and collaboration - for achieving that goal are addressed. On safety, the thesis presents a real-time collision avoidance method which allows the robot to adjust the offline generated paths of the industrial task in real-time for avoiding collisions with humans nearby. In addition, the thesis presented a new method for performing the reactive collision avoidance motion using second order Newton method which offers various advantages over the traditional methods in the literature. On collaboration, the thesis presents the precision hand-guiding as an alternative to the teach-pendant for performing precise positioning operations of the robot’s end-effector in a simple and intuitive manner. The thesis also presents new contributions into the mathematical formulation of robot dynamics, including a recursive algorithm for calculating the mass matrix of serially linked robots with a minimal second order cost, and a recursive algorithm for calculating Christoffel symbols efficiently. All the presented algorithms are validated either in simulation or in a real-world scenario.