Barrier functions enable safety-conscious force-feedback control

Abstract

In order to be effective partners for humans, robots must become increasingly comfortable with making contact with their environment. Unfortunately, it is hard for robots to distinguish between ``just enough'' and ``too much'' force: some force is required to accomplish the task but too much might damage equipment or injure humans. Traditional approaches to designing compliant force-feedback controllers, such as stiffness control, require difficult hand-tuning of control parameters and make it difficult to build safe, effective robot collaborators. In this paper, we propose a novel yet easy-to-implement force feedback controller that uses control barrier functions (CBFs) to derive a compliant controller directly from users' specifications of the maximum allowable forces and torques. We compare our approach to traditional stiffness control to demonstrate potential advantages of our control architecture, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our controller on an example human-robot collaboration task: cooperative manipulation of a bulky object.