Modeling of Superficial Pain using ANNs

In the environment where human coexists with robot, the problem of safety is very important. But it is difficult to separate the robot from the human in time-domain or space-domain unlike the case of factory automation, so a new concept is needed. One approach is to notice sensory and emotional feeling of human, and in this study "pain" is focused, which is a typical unpleasant feeling when the robot contacts us. In this paper, to design the controller based on the pain, an artificial superficial pain model caused by impact is proposed. This ASPM model consists of mechanical pain model, skin model and gate control by artificial neural networks (ANNs). The proposed ASPM is evaluated by experiments.