An Energy-based Control Barrier Function (CBF) is presented that limits kinetic energy of torque-controlled robots. The proposed CBF produces a safety-critical control action that bounds the kinetic energy of the manipulator by purely injecting damping in the underlying closed-loop system, not compromising its passivity and stability properties.
The presentation includes results of an extensive experimental validation of the approach on a 7-DoF Franka Emika Panda robot.