A Virtual Sensor for Collision Detection and Distinction with Conventional Industrial Robots

Physical contact inevitably occurs during robot interaction with outside environments. A robot should have the ability to detect and distinguish whether a physical interaction between a human and the robot is contact or collision, so as to ensure human safety and improve interaction performance. In this paper, a virtual sensor that can detect and distinguish contact and collision between humans and industrial robots is proposed. Based on the generalized momentum of the robot, two observers with low-pass and band-pass filter characteristics were designed in this virtual sensor to realize the robot collision detection. Using the different frequency distribution ranges of the lighter contact force signal and the heavier collision force signal, the filter parameters in the two observers were appropriately selected to distinguish between collisions and contacts in close interaction between humans and robots. The virtual sensor does not require acceleration information or inverse dynamics calculations. It only needs to sample the motor driving current and position information of the robot joint, and can easily be applied to conventional industrial robots. The experimental results show that the low-pass and band-pass torque observers can detect different force signals in real-time, and the proposed virtual sensor can be used for collision detection and distinction in human–robot interactions.