Experimental tests in human–robot collision evaluation and characterization of a new safety index for robot operation

•Review of approaches of safety indexes in impact cases based on head injury criteria.•Implementation of a new safety index.•Set up of a low-cost experimental procedure to simulate human-robot impact.•Evaluation of parameter influence of index estimation.

This paper describes an experimental procedure consisting of impact tests that simulate a collision of a human head with an industrial robot with the aim to validate a safety index named as New Index for Robots (NIR) and its outputs. The experiments in this paper are based on lab tests. It is an attempt to characterize the NIR index underlying the main parameters that are involved in crash interaction and to highlight limitations and weakness of suggested impact tests.