Reactive and Safety-Aware Path Replanning for Collaborative Applications

This paper addresses motion replanning in human-robot collaborative scenarios, with an emphasis on reactivity and safety-compliant efficiency. While existing human-aware motion planners perform well in structured environments, they often struggle with unpredictable human behavior. This can result in safety measures that hinder the robot’s performance and overall throughput. This study combines reactive path replanning and a safety-aware cost function, enabling the robot to adapt its path to the changes in the scene in real-time. This solution reduces the execution time and trajectory slowdowns while ensuring safety. Simulations and real-world experiments show the method’s effectiveness compared to standard human-robot cooperation approaches, with efficiency enhancements of up to 60%.