ERG for Safe Human Robot Interaction
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzbhMzcKSbE&feature=youtu.be]
This video is represents a significant milestone in Kelly Merckaert's research on safe Human-Robot Interaction. The control laws used in these experiments were developed during Kelly's 6-month research internship at CU Boulder, although their implementation on a physical robot had to wait for her to return to the research center in Brussels. The robot is able to operate safely thanks to the use of an Explicit Reference Governor, which guarantees constraint satisfaction while only having a computational footprint of ~1ms.
This experiment is a significant milestone for the development of computationally inexpensive strategies for the Constrained Control for Safe Human-Robot Interaction, and doubles up as a nontrivial validation of the Explicit Reference Governor framework in a highly non-convex setting.