Paper Abstract Robots require the ability to autonomously and continuously react to unexpected online changes in the task definition and in the environment, especially those cohabited with humans. To react to these changes, the task, from the current state up to the finish, must instantly be reconsidered. This implies a prohibitive re-computation cost. This paper proposes a modular control architecture based on Model Predictive Control, that offers a good compromise between optimally achieving the task and the required computation time, by only reconsidering the near future. [Read More]
Paper Abstract Efficient workspace sharing of collaborative robots and human operators remains an unsolved problem in the industry. This problem goes beyond the use of a priori or a posteriori safety measures and has to be tackled at the control level. To address the need of adaptation to human presence as well as to endow the robot with the ability to adapt interactively to new Cartesian targets, a linear Model Predictive Controller is proposed in this paper. [Read More]