A novel passivity-based control law for safe human-robot coexistence

This paper presents a new control law for robotic manipulators in unstructured environments which guarantees the achievement of the goal position without incurring in local minima. The passivity of the closed-loop system renders this control scheme well-suited for human-robot coexistence, especially when the robot is supposed to share its workspace with humans. The given control law has been implemented and experimentally tested in a realistic scenario, demonstrating the effectiveness in driving the robot to a given configuration in a cluttered environment without any offline planning phase.