Supplementary Material To: A Safety Benchmark for Capacitive Proximity Sensing in Robotics – Safe Transient Contact Compliant to ISO TS 15066: Power and Force Limiting

Supplementary Data for Publication "A Safety Benchmark for Capacitive Proximity Sensing in Robotics - Safe Transient Contact in Compliance to ISO TS 15066: Power and Force Limiting The Supplementary Data includesSTL files of the test objects (already available)Measurement Data of each institute for the shown test objects (will be uploaded soon) Disclaimer: This publication was submitted and is currently under review to be published for IEEE RA-L with ICRA 2021 option. Fundings: The research leading to this results has received fundingfrom the ”K ̈arntner Wirtschaftsf ̈orderung Fonds” (KWF) andthe ”European Regional Development Fund” (EFRE) withinthe CapSize project 26616/30969/44253 and from the Fed-eral Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministeriumf ̈ur Bildung und Forschung in Germany, BMWF) within theproject SINA (Verbundprojekt-Nr.: V5ARA114) Preliminary version of the abstract: During the co-presence of human workers and robots in the same workspace, Power and Force Limiting (PFL) according to ISO TS 15066 is required to avoid injuries during undesired contacts. Capacitive Proximity Sensors (CPSs) offer a cost-effective solution to cover the entire robot manipulator with a fast close-range perception for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) tasks. Compared to pure tactile or force sensing, the sensors allow to increase the operating speed of cobots while still maintaining PFL. The robot reacts before impacts occur and does not suffer from occlusion, as the sensors can be placed directly on the robot’s surface to cover the full area and close the perception gap between tactile detection and mid-range distance sensors. However, since capacitive coupling to obstacles varies with distance, shape, and material properties,the projection from capacitance to actual distances is a general problem. A reference benchmark is required for the evaluation to ensure safe PFL. We derive the requirements described in ISO TS 15066 for PFL of critical body regions and propose a method for determining the pre-detection operation speed to comply with PFL. We propose an universal benchmark test procedure for fellow researchers to evaluate their capacitive sensors for safe PFL. With researchers from four different institutes presenting three different concepts of capacitive sensors and their applicability on different robots, the benchmark test procedure is evaluated, and the general applicability is demonstrated.