A Review of Safety Methods for Human-robot Collaboration and a Proposed Novel Approach

Physical and mental well‐being of cobot workers: A scoping review using the Software‐Hardware‐Environment‐Liveware‐Liveware‐Organization model

“…Collision avoidance is a classic research topic, extensively studied by researchers, and promising technologies for preventing human‐cobot impacts during HRC activities include virtual fencing systems based on passive infrared sensors (Anand et al, 2018), projection‐based safety system (Maurtua et al, 2017; Vogel et al, 2013), augmented environments using computer vision (Mohammed et al, 2017), inertial measurement units combined with global localization systems (Corrales et al, 2012) and depth sensors (Flacco et al, 2015; Hietanen et al, 2020; Magrini et al, 2020). Many papers mentioned generic physical harm or physical safety as a risk factor to be considered when designing collaborative interactions between humans and robots (Kong & Yu, 2014; Marvel & Norcross, 2017; Ore et al, 2019; Reddy et al, 2019), including studies on minimization of injuries if a collision occurs. Injury minimization after an unwanted collision can be pursued through mechanical compliance systems aiming at reducing impact energy or strategies involving contact detection (Pang et al, 2021).…”

“…Another review demonstrated that HFE issues are rarely considered as requirement when designing collaborative robotic workstations, suggesting that further work should be undertaken to create a comprehensive framework to allow an assessment of both physical and mental workload during human‐cobot interaction (Cardoso et al, 2021). Several authors reviewed methods to ensure physical safety in industrial HRC applications (Reddy et al, 2019; Robla‐Gomez et al, 2017), without considering aspects related to mental health. Matheson et al (2019) identified 35 case studies of industrial applications, grouping them into three broad categories based on their focus: productivity, safety, or human–robot interaction.…”

“…Another review demonstrated that HFE issues are rarely considered as requirement when designing collaborative robotic workstations, suggesting that further work should be undertaken to create a comprehensive framework to allow an assessment of both physical and mental workload during human-cobot interaction (Cardoso et al, 2021). Several authors reviewed methods to ensure physical safety in industrial HRC applications (Reddy et al, 2019;Robla-Gomez et al, 2017), without considering aspects related to mental health. Looking at the larger picture of Industry 4.0, a review highlighted that most articles focus on the technologies driving this revolution, rather than on worker's health and safety: Kadir et al ( 2018) applied a broader search for contributions in the field of HFE applied to Industry 4.0 and found that only a minority of the 40 papers reviewed were journal articles.…”

LiDAR-Based Maintenance of a Safe Distance between a Human and a Robot Arm

“…A wide variety of sensors can be encountered in the HRC-related literature, which can be positioned on a robot, on locations with a good view near the HRC workspace, sometimes even on a human. Commonly used sensors include the following: a single camera [7] or several cameras [8], stereo cameras [9], RGB-D visual sensors [10], ultrasonic sensors [11], infrared thermal sensors [12], laser-based technologies, including time-of-flight (TOF) sensor arrays, 3D TOF cameras and 2D/3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanners [13][14][15][16], or different combinations, such as 2D laser scanners and a Kinect RGB-D visual sensor [17], or RGB cameras, a depth camera and a thermal imager [18].…”