**5. Conclusion**

In this chapter, three different enabling technologies at research frontiers have been discussed to support safe interactions between robots and humans in different fields of robotics, mainly focusing on service, medical, and rehabilitation areas. We provided an extensive overview of variable stiffness, hyper-redundancy, and smart-skin structures in application cases. All these structures are only some of the enablers for safe HRI, and future studies should concentrate on integrating them in service robotics for the full benefit. While the variable stiffness offers inherent compliance during interaction and adaptability of the structures, the hyper-redundancy may allow better controllability of available degrees of freedom. Finally, the smart robotic skins can provide crucial feedback for safer interactions. As a holistic approach to safe HRI, inherent or structural compliance, enhanced controllability, and improved tactile feedback can bring significant safety built in robotic structures. In future work, the robotics platform that can integrate all of them may even have synergistic effects of the combined subsystems as the tactile feedback may directly be linked to variable stiffness adjustment or reconfigure the active links in a hyper-redundant structure.

**11**

*Safe Human-Robot Interaction Using Variable Stiffness, Hyper-Redundancy, and Smart Robotic…*

This work has been partially funded by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

during the Experienced Researcher Fellowship project of Dr. Pinar Boyraz at Leibniz University of Hannover under the supervision of Prof. Tobias Ortmaier and

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92693*

**Acknowledgements**

Prof. Annika Raatz.

**Author details**

Genova, Italy

† Deceased.

Pinar Boyraz Baykas1

Kartal, Istanbul, Turkey

\* †

provided the original work is properly cited.

Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

, Ertugrul Bayraktar2

\*Address all correspondence to: boyraz.pinar@googlemail.com

1 Department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Chalmers University of

3 Siemens A.S., Digital Industry Division, Motion Control-Machine Tool Systems,

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

2 Visual Geometry and Modelling (VGM) Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia,

and Cihat Bora Yigit3

*Safe Human-Robot Interaction Using Variable Stiffness, Hyper-Redundancy, and Smart Robotic… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92693*
