Evaluation of Biofidelity and a Proposal for Simplification of a Human-inspired Safety Dummy

Abstract

To allow robots to safely perform collaborative work with people, we need to ensure the safety of individuals who might come into contact with robots. Part of this process is to develop a method by which pain and slight injuries can be precisely evaluated. For the first time in the world, we have developed a dummy by which we can evaluate human pain. This dummy is based on the human body structure and is designed to model the forces that are created in a human body at the moment of its coming into contact with a robot. We have confirmed so far that the dummy's force-displacement characteristics are similar to that of the human body if a quasi-static contact with a robot should occur. Having acquired such confirmation, this paper then discusses the biofidelity of the dummy during its dynamic contact with a robot. To ease the more common adoption of our dummy technology, we will also propose a method by which our human-inspired safety dummy can be simplified while maintaining its high degree of biofidelity.