The effectiveness of virtual environments in developing collaborative strategies between industrial robots and humans

Abstract

Testing and implementation of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) could be dangerous due to the high-speed movements and massive forces generated by industrial robots. Wherever humans and industrial robots share a common workplace, accidents are likely to happen and always unpredictable. This has hindered the development of human robot collaborative strategies as well as the ability of authorities to pass regulations on how humans and robots should work together in close proximities. This paper presents the use of a Virtual Reality digital twin of a physical layout as a mechanism to understand human reactions to both predictable and unpredictable robot motions. A set of established metrics as well as a newly developed Kinetic Energy Ratio metric are used to analyse human reactions and validate the effectiveness of the Virtual Reality environment. It is the aim that Virtual Reality digital twins could inform the safe implementation of Human-Robot Collaborative strategies in factories of the future.

Symbiotic human-robot collaborative assembly

“…Assembly tasks shared by humans and robots in HRC assembly are dynamic in nature [253]. They are often planned for and assigned to available and capable resources (humans and robots) at the time of collaboration [188]. This requires constant resource monitoring for better context awareness.…”

The development and evaluation of Robot Light Skin: A novel robot signalling system to improve communication in industrial human–robot collaboration

“…The cost of this technology should eventually decrease from the current level which enables it to be a feasibly low cost solution. Furthermore, the developed concept will be relatively simple to implement onto collaborative systems or retrofitted to existing production systems when compared with other interactive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) [42,43] and Augmented Reality (AR) [39,40]. It can also be integrated with other interactive devices such as tactile sensing modules [41] or combined with other safety strategy such as collision avoidance [44].…”

Perancangan Dan Validasi Modul Penyusun Serious Game Berbasis Sepeda Virtual Untuk Rehabilitasi Pasca Stroke

“…Kombinasi antara lingkungan virtual dengan robotik dan manusia telah menghasilkan efektifitas kerja yang kompleks dan meningkatkan keselamatan dalam beraktivitas kerja [1]. Penggunaan sepeda yang dipadukan dengan aplikasi permainan telah berhasil meningkatkan intensitas latihan dalam meningkatkan kebugaram [2,3].…”