Investigation of robot-human impact

The hazardous potential of a robot manipulator in robot-human was investigated. Limits were required to be set so that only an acceptable severity of injury for the human remains from an unintended robot-human contact. Two simulation approaches for the quantitative computation of injury severity, based on the Finite Element Method (FE) and Multibody Dynamics were presented. Their ability to conduct robot-human crash tests was presented with a method to rate the safety performance according to scoring systems. As the head is the most vulnerable part of the human body, head impacts were conducted first. The most popular head injury index is the so called Head Injury Criteria, which is computed as the maximum integral of the resultant acceleration of the center of mass of the head during the crash. It is computed within the dynamical FE program LS-DYNA where the robot and a model of a side impact dummy are implemented, and crash scenarios of robot and a worker are simulated.