Panasonic Holdings Corporation has developed a new technology that can teach robot motions that includes contact with the surrounding environment (doors, tables, and more), control parameters that achieve both performance that correctly completes the taught motion and safety during contact.

As the use of industrial robots advances, technology for efficiently programming robot movements is becoming more and more important. In particular, in environments involving contact with people and objects, movements that reduce the risk of contact while performing tasks accurately are required, but robot control that achieves both is known to be extremely difficult. Therefore, we have developed a method to efficiently program a robot assuming it behaves flexibly like a spring. We developed a novel method to learn stiffness parameters of inpedance control to satisfy both task performance and safety requirements by segmenting the motions taught to robots demonstrated by humans and multi-objective Bayesian optimization.

The advancedness of this technology has been recognized internationally, and it has been accepted to the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2023, a top conference for AI and robotics technology (having an acceptance rate of 43%).
It will be presented at the plenary session to be held in Detroit, Michigan in the USA from October 1 to October 5, 2023.