Abstract
Human safety is one of the most important issues in human-friendly robotics. We have proposed a safety device to improve the safety of human-friendly robots for humans. The safety device consists of only mechanical components without actuators, controllers and batteries. The safety device is attached to each drive-shaft of a robot and locks the drive-shaft after detecting an unexpected robot motion on the basis of the drive-shaft's angular velocity. In this paper, we start with reviewing the structure and mechanism of the safety device. Then, we explain a theoretical analysis of the safety device. Furthermore, we propose a method for further improving the safety device. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of the method for improving the safety device from the theoretical analysis results and the experimental results.
