Sub-Millisecond Reflexes for Continuous Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract:Continuous physical human-robot interaction requires robots to rapidly adapt their control behaviour without interrupting task execution. However, existing ROS 2 control architectures rely on stop-to-switch mechanisms that introduce substantial delays and interrupt execution. We present an open-source, sub-millisecond reflex engine based on an enhanced ROS 2-compatible multimode controller that enables deterministic switching between control modalities and integrates reflex behaviours for mitigating contact hazards and kinematic limit violations. Experiments on a Franka Robotics manipulator demonstrate switching delays below 0.1 ms, more than four orders of magnitude faster than conventional ros2_control, while maintaining continuous operation during safety-critical events. In a multi-stage manipulation task, the proposed framework reduced execution time by 3.5% and peak trajectory jerk by more than threefold. By eliminating runtime middleware overhead, controller transitions are implemented as lock-free pointer operations, enabling reflex-level responsiveness within an open-source robotics framework.

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2610.21913 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.21913v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21913 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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