Human safety around robots is an important requirement in their design. As a part of the EU H2020 Aerial-CORE project, this report will use data-driven research to design an impedance controller which ensures human safety in the case of a collision. All the experimental results are for the Fiberthex aerial manipulator.
To be able to rate the safety of a collision, literary research is conducted into different types of safety metrics, as well as human pain and injury tolerance. Using the Fiberthex as a basis, a model is developed for conducting collision simulations in Simulink.
The results are plotted and used to draw conclusions about the limits and optimal parameters of the control system. From this, the Fiberthex can be improved and human safety enhanced.