Human–robot collaboration has demonstrated its potential to increase efficiency and productivity in industry. However, inherently safe collaborative robots offer limited payloads and are unsuitable for many heavy lifting and manipulation tasks that would benefit from collaboration. The use of high-payload robots in physical human–robot interaction poses significant safety and performance issues due to the robots’ high inertia and power. As a result, these robots either operate autonomously, spatially separated from humans, or at very low speeds, making collaboration ineffective. In this work, we develop an integrated system that allows humans to interact with a high-payload industrial robot in a safe and effective manner.
