Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper presents a unified approach to detection and isolation of both actuator faults and unexpected collisions for a two-link robot with a flexible forearm. The proposed approach is sensorless, i.e., no dedicated exteroceptive sensors are considered, and is based on the design of residuals to be used as monitoring filters. The method has been tested by extensive simulations on the Flexarm robot used as case study. The reported results show the efficacy in detecting and isolating faults in the actuators or collisions on the robot links.

We present an approach to safe physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) for industrial robots, including collision detection, distinguishing accidental from intentional contacts, and achieving collaborative tasks. Typical industrial robots have a closed control architecture that accepts only velocity/position reference inputs, there are no joint torque sensors, and little or no information is available to the user on robot dynamics and on low-level joint controllers.