Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Design Principles for Safety in Human-Robot Interaction

  • Published:
International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The interaction of humans and robots has the potential to set new grounds in industrial applications as well as in service robotics because it combines the strengths of humans, such as flexibility and adaptability, and the strengths of robots, such as power and precision. However, for a successful interaction the safety of the human has to be guaranteed at all times. This goal can be reached by the use of specialised robot hardware but we argue that safety in human-robot interaction can also be done with regular industrial robots, if they are equipped with additional sensors to track the human’s position and to analyse the human’s verbal and non-verbal utterances, and if the software that is controlling the robot is especially designed towards safety in the interaction. For this reason, we propose three design principles for an increased safety in robot architectures and any other software component that controls a robot for human-robot interaction: robustness, fast reaction time, and context awareness. We present a robot architecture that is based on these principles and show approaches for speech processing, vision processing, and robot control that also follow these guidelines.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Ades AE, Steedman MJ (1982) On the order of words. Linguist Philos 4:517–558

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Ajdukiewicz K (1935) Die syntaktische konnexität. Stud Philos 1:1–27

    Google Scholar 

  3. Baldridge J, Kruijff G-J (2002) Coupling CCG and hybrid logic dependency semantics. In: Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (ACL 02), University of Pennsylania, Philadelphia, PA

  4. Bar-Hillel Y (1953) A quasi-arithmetic notation for syntactic description. Language 29:47–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Brick T, Scheutz M (2007) Incremental natural language processing for hri. In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction. ACM, New York, pp 263–270

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Chen TP, Budnikov D, Hughes CJ, Chen Y-K (2007) Computer vision on multi-core processors: articulated body tracking. In: 2007 IEEE international conference on multimedia and expo. Intel Corporation, IEEE ICME, pp 1862–1865

  7. Culler DE, Singh JP, Gupta A (1999) Parallel computer architecture: a hardware/software approach. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo

    Google Scholar 

  8. De Santis A, Albu-Schäffer A, Ott C, Siciliano B, Hirzinger G (2007) The skeleton algorithm for self-collision avoidance of a humanoid manipulator. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/ASME international conference on advanced intelligent mechatronics, pp 1–6

  9. Fellbaum C, et al (1998) WordNet: an electronic lexical database. MIT Press, Cambridge

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  10. Fletcher R (1987) Quadratic programming. In: Practical methods of optimization, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York, pp 229–258. Chap 10

    Google Scholar 

  11. Message Passing Interface Forum (1995) MPI, a message-passing interface standard. Technical report, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, June 1995

  12. Foster ME, Bard EG, Hill RL, Guhe M, Oberlander J, Knoll A (2008) The roles of haptic-ostensive referring expressions in cooperative, task-based human-robot dialogue. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on human robot interaction (HRI 2008), Amsterdam, March 2008, pp 295–302

  13. Foster ME, Giuliani M, Isard A, Matheson C, Oberlander J, Knoll A (2009) Evaluating description and reference strategies in a cooperative human-robot dialogue system. In: Proceedings of the twenty-first international joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI-09), Pasadena, CA, July 2009

  14. Freund E, Rossman J (2003) The basic ideas of a proven dynamic collision avoidance approach for multi-robot manipulator systems. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems, pp 1173–1177

  15. Freund E, Schluse M, Rossmann J (2001) Dynamic collision avoidance for redundant multi-robot systems. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems, pp 1201–1206

  16. Gamma E, Helm R, Johnson R, Vlissides J (1998) Design patterns: elements of reusable object-orientated software. Addison-Wesley professional computing series. Addison-Wesley, Reading

    Google Scholar 

  17. Giuliani M, Knoll A (2007) Integrating multimodal cues using grammar based models. In: Stephanidis C (ed) Proceedings of the 4th international conference on universal access in human-computer interaction, HCI international, Part II, Beijing, July 2007. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 4555. Springer, Berlin, pp 858–867

    Google Scholar 

  18. Haddadin S, Albu-Schäffer A, Frommberger M, Rossmann J, Hirzinger G (2009) The “DLR crash report”: towards a standard crash-testing protocol for robot safety-part II: discussions. In: IEEE int conf on robotics and automation (ICRA2008), Kobe, Japan, pp 280–287

  19. Haddadin S, Albu-Schäffer A, Hirzinger G (2007) Safety evaluation of physical human-robot interaction via crash-testing. In: Robotics: science and systems conference (RSS2007), pp 217–224

  20. Haddadin S, Albu-Schäffer A, Hirzinger G (2008) The role of the robot mass and velocity in physical human-robot interaction—Part II: constrained blunt impacts. In: IEEE int. conf. on robotics and automation (ICRA2008), Pasadena, USA, pp 1339–1345

  21. Haddadin S, Albu-Schäffer A, Hirzinger G (2009) Requirements for safe robots: measurements, analysis and new insights. Int J Robot Res 28(11–12):1507

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Hawes N, Wyatt J, Sloman A (2006) An architecture schema for embodied cognitive systems. Technical report CSR-06-12, University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, November 2006

  23. Herlihy M (1991) Wait-free synchronization. ACM Trans Program Lang Syst (TOPLAS) 13(1):124–149

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Huber M, Radrich H, Wendt C, Rickert M, Knoll A, Brandt T, Glasauer S (2009) Evaluation of a novel biologically inspired trajectory generator in human-robot interaction. In: Proceedings of the 18th IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication. IEEE, September 2009

  25. Kruijff G-J, Brenner M, Hawes N (2008) Continual planning for cross-modal situated clarification in human-robot interaction. In: Proceedings of the 17th international symposium on robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN 2008), Munich, Germany, August 2008

  26. Kruijff G-J, Lison P, Benjamin T, Jacobsson H, Hawes N (2007) Incremental multi-level processing for comprehending situated dialogue in human-robot interaction. In: Lopes LS, Belpaeme T, Cowley SJ (eds) Symposium on language and robots (LangRo 2007), Aveiro, Portugal, December 2007

  27. Lenz C, Nair S, Rickert M, Knoll A, Rösel W, Gast J, Wallhoff F (2008) Joint-action for humans and industrial robots for assembly tasks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication, pp 130–135

  28. Levenshtein VI (1966) Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions and reversals. Sov Phys Dokl 10:707–710

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  29. Li Y, McLean D, Bandar ZA, O’Shea JD, Crockett K (2006) Sentence similarity based on semantic nets and corpus statistics. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng, pp 1138–1150

  30. Müller T, Knoll A (2009) Attention driven visual processing for an interactive dialog robot. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM symposium on applied computing, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, March 2009

  31. Müller T, Ziaie P, Knoll A (2008) A wait-free realtime system for optimal distribution of vision tasks on multicore architectures. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on informatics in control, automation and robotics, Funchal, Portugal, May 2008

  32. Ott C, Eiberger O, Friedl W, Bauml B, Hillenbrand U, Borst C, Albu-Schäffer A, Brunner B, Hirschmuller H, Kielhofer S, et al (2006) A humanoid two-arm system for dexterous manipulation. In: Humanoid robots, 2006 6th IEEE-RAS international conference, pp 276–283

  33. Pfeifer R, Bongard J, Grand S (2007) How the body shapes the way we think: a new view of intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  34. Quirk R, Greenbaum S, Leech G, Svartvik J (1985) A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  35. Sentis L (2007) Synthesis and control of whole-body behaviors in humanoid systems. PhD thesis, Standford University

  36. Sentis L, Khatib O (2004) Task-oriented control of humanoid robots through prioritization. In: Proceedings of the IEEE-RAS/RSJ international conference on humanoid robots

  37. Simpson HR (1994) Methodological and notational conventions in doris real-time networks. In: IED supporting predictable implementation of requirements in timing and safety (SPIRITS) deliverable

  38. Simpson HR (2003) Protocols for process interaction. IEE Proc Comput Digit Tech 150(3):157–182

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Sloman A (2009) Some requirements for human-like robots: why the recent over-emphasis on embodiment has held up progress. In: Sendhoff B, Koerner E, Sporns O, Ritter H, Doya K (eds) Creating brain-like intelligence. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp 248–277

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  40. Steedman M (2000) The syntactic process. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  41. Sundell H, Tsigas P (2005) Fast and lock-free concurrent priority queues for multi-thread systems. J Parallel Distrib Comput 65(5):609–627

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  42. van den Bergen G (1999) A fast and robust GJK implementation for collision detection of convex objects. J Graphics Tools 4(2):7–25

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  43. White M (2006) Efficient realization of coordinate structures in combinatory categorial grammar. Res Lang Comput 4(1):39–75

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  44. Yakovlev A, Xia F, Shang D (2001) Synthesis and implementation of a signal-type asynchronous data communication mechanism. In: Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on asynchronous circuits and systems (ASYNC), p 127

  45. Yang Y, Brock O (2006) Elastic roadmaps: globally task-consistent motion for autonomous mobile manipulation in dynamic environments. In: Proceedings of the robotics science and systems conference

  46. Zäh M, Beetz M, Shea K, Reinhart G, Bender K, Lau C, Ostgathe M, Vogl W, Wiesbeck ME, Ertelt C, Rühr T, Friedrich M (2009) Changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing systems. The cognitive factory. Springer, Berlin, pp 355–371

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics and Embedded Systems, Technische Universität München, Boltzmannstraße 3, 85748, Garching bei München, Germany

    Manuel Giuliani, Claus Lenz, Thomas Müller, Markus Rickert & Alois Knoll

Authors
  1. Manuel Giuliani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Claus Lenz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Thomas Müller
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Markus Rickert
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Alois Knoll
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manuel Giuliani.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Giuliani, M., Lenz, C., Müller, T. et al. Design Principles for Safety in Human-Robot Interaction. Int J of Soc Robotics 2, 253–274 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-010-0052-0

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-010-0052-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation