Detecting Safety Anomalies in pHRI Activities via Force Myography

Abstract

The potential application of using a wearable force myography (FMG) band for monitoring the occupational safety of a human participant working in collaboration with an industrial robot was studied. Regular physical human–robot interactions were considered as activities of daily life in pHRI (pHRI-ADL) to recognize human-intended motions during such interactions. The force myography technique was used to read volumetric changes in muscle movements while a human participant interacted with a robot. Data-driven models were used to observe human activities for useful insights. Using three unsupervised learning algorithms, isolation forest, one-class SVM, and Mahalanobis distance, models were trained to determine pHRI-ADL/regular, preset activities by learning the latent features’ distributions. The trained models were evaluated separately to recognize any unwanted interactions that differed from the normal activities, i.e., anomalies that were novel, inliers, or outliers to the normal distributions. The models were able to detect unusual, novel movements during a certain scenario that was considered an unsafe interaction. Once a safety hazard was detected, the control system generated a warning signal within seconds of the event. Hence, this study showed the viability of using FMG biofeedback to indicate risky interactions to prevent injuries, improve occupational health, and monitor safety in workplaces that require human participation.

The Comfort and Measurement Precision-Based Multi-Objective Optimization Method for Gesture Interaction

“…A human energy expenditure model based on heat dissipation [37] and muscular mechanical energy expenditure [38] was proposed, but it has not been used in a human comfort study. Additionally, there is numerous research on how to make the human body more comfortable, including those on aircraft cabins [39], agricultural machines [40], military vehicles [41], pHRI activities [2], construction [42], and wheelchairs [43]. The comfort models are either deficient in human biomechanical knowledge or inappropriate for optimizing gestures.…”