Soft-tissue injury in robotics

Up to now, mostly blunt human-robot impacts were investigated in the robotics literature. In this context, the influence of robot mass and velocity during rigid impacts with and without the possibility of the human being clamped was quantified. In this paper an analysis of soft-tissue injuries caused by sharp tools, which are mounted on/grasped by a robot is carried out as the next step down the road to a full safety analysis of robots for HRI. We conducted an analysis of soft-tissue injuries based on available biomechanical and forensic data and to our knowledge for the first time in robotics present various experimental results with biological tissue for validation. Furthermore, possible countermeasures are evaluated quantitatively based biomechanically relevant quantities.