Energy aware Safety-Critical control of robotic manipulators with elastic actuators: A CBF-based approach

Series elasticactuators are an interesting safety-critical tool in the field of collaborative robotics, decoupling the motor side and the robot link side by placing a stiffness in between them; hence its energetic behavior is of fundamental importance for safety-critical applications in a collab- orative robotics framework, where the system should not exceed energetic safety limits. This work proposes two energy aware safety-critical control schemes inspired by the stable tracking of safe reduced order models, where thefirst scheme constrains and limits themechan- ical power flowing between the robotic manipulator and the elastic actuators while the second scheme constrains the kinetic energy of the robotic manipulator. As main result, an extensive characterization of the control schemes is provided, computing the conditions on the control parameters under which are guaranteed the safety conditions for the system.