Learning-Based Safety-Aware Task Scheduling for Efficient Human-Robot Collaboration

Ensuring human safety in collaborative robotics can compromise efficiency because traditional safety measures increase robot cycle time when human interaction is frequent. This letter proposes a safety-aware approach to mitigate efficiency losses without assuming prior knowledge of safety logic. Using a deep-learning model, the robot learns the relationship between system state and safety-induced speed reductions based on execution data. Our framework does not explicitly predict human motions but directly models the interaction effects on robot speed, simplifying implementation and enhancing generalizability to different safety logics. At runtime, the learned model optimizes task selection to minimize cycle time while adhering to safety requirements. Experiments on a pick-and-packaging scenario demonstrated significant reductions in cycle times.