An Active Airbag System for Safer Human–Robot Collaboration: Impact Modeling, Prototype Development, and Validation

Ensuring safety in physical human–robot interaction is one of the crucial challenges for the robotics community. While innovations in robot design and control enabled collaborative operations, collision handling is still an open issue. In this regard, to improve robots' abilities, two different solutions have been explored: large-area tactile skins and airbags. The former generates a detailed map of contact forces and its spread is limited by costs and difficult manufacturing processes. Airbags, instead, absorb part of the collision energy, as well as enable early collision detection. They are now starting to appear in industrial applications. However, state-of-the-art airbags can only store the impact energy through their compression, thus not always guaranteeing the occurrence of safe contact forces. In this article, a safety-oriented model to evaluate impact forces as well as an active airbag capable of dissipating impact energy through a controlled deflation have been developed and validated (first and second contribution). Moreover, the potential of such a technology has been evaluated (third contribution) showing that its deployment would allow, given the same safety requirements, a faster and, consequently, more productive robot operation.