Sensor fusion for human safety in industrial workcells

Abstract

(a) (b) (c) Abstract-Current manufacturing practices require complete physical separation between people and active industrial robots. These precautions ensure safety, but are inefficient in terms of time and resources, and place limits on the types of tasks that can be performed. In this paper, we present a real-time, sensor-based approach for ensuring the safety of people in close proximity to robots in an industrial workcell. Our approach fuses data from multiple 3D imaging sensors of different modalities into a volumetric evidence grid and segments the volume into regions corresponding to background, robots, and people. Surrounding each robot is a danger zone that dynamically updates according to the robot's position and trajectory. Similarly, surrounding each person is a dynamically updated safety zone. A collision between danger and safety zones indicates an impending actual collision, and the affected robot is stopped until the problem is resolved. We demonstrate and experimentally evaluate the concept in a prototype industrial workcell augmented with stereo and range cameras.

Symbiotic human-robot collaborative assembly

“…On the other hand, ToF cameras provide high performance solution for depth images acquisition, but with insufficient level of pixel resolution (capable of reaching 200200) and with rather high cost. Recently, Rybski et al [213] acquired data from 3D imaging sensors to construct a three-dimensional grid for locating foreign objects and identifying human operators, robots and background. Ahmad and Plapper [2] also introduced a ToF sensor-based information collection and intelligent decision methodology in order to localise the unknown, un-programmed obstacles and propose a safe peg-in-hole.…”

Toward safe close-proximity human-robot interaction with standard industrial robots

“…In the realm of collision prevention, innovation in 3D sensor fusion and the use of dynamic safety zones appears to be a promising method [11]. The ability to predict human actions also has the potential to prevent collision.…”

Multiple target tracking based on particle filtering for safety in industrial robotic cells

“…The constant introduction of robots in industrial environments, the creation of new compliant robots and the sensors available nowadays in the market, cheaper and more accurate, makes it an even more interesting research subject [3,4]. Different approaches can be found for safe human-robot interaction, from pre-collision to post-collision [9] approaches, using force sensors [9,10] or different vision systems [2,10,11], just to name few.…”

“…Focusing on industrial environments, Ribsky et al [2] propose a real-time system based on multiple 3D imaging sensors, fusing their information to ensure the safety of people in close proximity to robots in industrial workcells. The system allows slowing down the robot and even stop the motion when people and robot approximate.…”

“…Human-robot collaboration [1] is a key issue for the development of factories of the future, a space where humans and robots can work and carry out tasks together [2]. The introduction of robots in shop-floors allows sharing the different tasks of the production process between humans and machines, giving the chance to liberate human operators from repetitive and monotonous works to perform high added value operations.…”