In the context of safety-critical control, we propose and analyse the use of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to limit the kinetic energy of torque-controlled robots. The proposed scheme is able to modify a nominal control action in a minimally invasive manner to achieve the desired kinetic energy limit. We show how this safety condition is achieved by appropriately injecting damping in the underlying robot dynamics independently of the nominal controller structure. We present an extensive experimental validation of the approach on a 7-Degree of Freedom (DoF) Franka Emika Panda robot. The results demonstrate that this approach provides an effective, minimally invasive safety layer that is straightforward to implement and is robust in real experiments.

翻译：在安全关键控制领域，我们提出并分析了利用控制屏障函数（CBFs）限制力矩控制机器人动能的方法。所提方案能够以最小干预的方式修正标称控制动作，从而实现期望的动能限制。我们证明了通过独立于标称控制器结构，在机器人底层动力学中适当注入阻尼，即可实现该安全条件。我们在7自由度Franka Emika Panda机器人上对该方法进行了全面的实验验证。结果表明，该方法提供了一种高效、干预最小的安全保护层，易于实现且在真实实验中具有鲁棒性。