Assessing Safety of Object Pushing Using the Principle of Reversibility

Abstract

This article presents an implementation of an innovative safety module for a robot control architecture. It applies the principle of reversibility to assess intrinsic safety of actions and to adapt robot’s behavior. The underlying idea is that all reversible actions are intrinsically safe. A practical experiment is conducted to demonstrate that a robot control architecture can develop complex safe behaviors. This is accomplished by using the safety module in conjunction with human-based knowledge and sufficiently high level of perception. A robot is placed in a room with a movable object while the safety module analyzes movements of the robot and the object. As the result, the robot can identify, for example, that pushing object into a corner is irreversible and thus unsafe.