Injury Biomechanics and Safety

Physical human-robot-interaction (pHRI) aims at enabling humans and robots to share their workspace and to get into direct contact. To realize this, ensuring human safety is the most essential requirement. In this context, our work on injury biomechanics and safety in robotics unfolded into an entirely new research discipline tightly connected to injury biomechanics, forensics, and accident research. Our group developed the biomechanical analysis and quantification of potential human injuries in pHRI, which seeks the understanding of the inherent risks emanating from robot-human collisions. We established a new point of view on the relation between human and robot, allowing the quantification, modeling, and therefore even handling or mitigation of potential risks.

Contributions

Together with medical centers, initial injury analyses were conducted and a database of injury occurrence in different risk scenarios was constructed [28, 109, 110, 111]. 

Massive amount of results have been obtained through extensive literature reviews, large-scale collision experiments and simulations. This provided unifying insights into the causal relation between robot design parameters and the system’s dynamic state on the one hand, and consequential degree of injury of humans in case of an unwanted collision on the other hand [114]. 

The gathered theoretical knowledge and practical experimental procedures from all reviewed studies and guidelines on injury evaluation through various testing setups and scenarios are introduced to robotics. Our work has lead to a more profound understanding of human injury biomechanics and is, consequently, also of great value to medical trauma research. 

Moreover, based on the fundamental understanding of impact dynamics, we developed the standard algorithms to embed injury knowledge into real-time control [115] and planning [116, 117, 118] algorithms. We developed an entire algorithmic framework to understand the impact safety aspects of floating-base robots as complex as humanoids [119]. 

Additionally, various test devices for safety benchmarking and testing were established to obtain injury data from unconstrained and constrained collision scenarios in robotic applications [120, 121]. 

Last but not least, useful insights and standardized protocols for carrying out crash-testing [122] in robotics are provided and findings are continuously being communicated to the relevant standardization communities and their working teams on robot safety.