A control barrier function approach to human-multi-robot safe interaction

A fundamental prerequisite to achieve a successful human-robot cooperation is human safety, which becomes even more crucial when multiple robots are involved in the cooperative task. A general solution for addressing safety in human-multi-robot scenarios is proposed in this paper. Human safety is assessed by a safety field which accounts for the multi-robot system as a whole. The assessment of human safety is exploited within an optimization protocol where the robots' cooperative task trajectory is scaled whenever required, while exploiting the system redundancy. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are adopted to set up the optimization problem and kinematic and dynamic constraints are taken into consideration. Finally, simulations on a realistic setup composed of three industrial mobile manipulators show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.