Motion generation for human-robot cooperation considering range of joint movement

We have proposed a real-time self-collision avoidance motion generation method for the manipulator of the robot used for human-robot cooperation. In this method, we represent the robots' body by using elastic elements referred to as "RoBE (Representation of Body by Elastic elements)". The self-collision avoidance could be realized based on a virtual reaction force generated by the contacts between the elastic elements before the actual self-collision of the robot. In this paper, we expand this method to control not only robots' manipulator, but also its mobile base. Furthermore, we focus on the range of the joint movement of the robot, and propose the self-collision avoidance motion generation method considering it. Because of these, the self-collision motions which could deal with task/environmental constraints could be generated on the robot cooperating with a human. The proposed method is implemented in the planar 4-DOF mobile manipulator, and computer simulations are done for illustrating the validity of it.