A proximity/contact-force sensor for Human Safety in industrial robot environment

In this paper, a new approach based on a proximity/contact-force sensor to improve the Human Safety in the Human-Robot cooperative tasks is presented. The sensor is able to detect both the presence of a nearby object and the contact pressure exercised by an external object when a collision occurs. The sensor is interfaced with an ABB industrial robot using only the standard control unit; the standard RAPID primitives are used to define the robot task. The task speed is reduced as soon as an obstacle is detected by the proximity sensing element, while, the robot is stopped when a contact occurs, that is detected by a contact-force sensing element.