A quest towards safe human robot collaboration

Abstract

In the upcoming industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) automation and robotics play a central role. Humans and robots are expected to share the same workspace and work safely side by side. Consequently, various collaborative robots have been introduced to the market. Nevertheless, those robots are still limited in their reactions. In some cases they are restricted to reducing their working speed as a response to the proximity of humans or they initiate an emergency stop, particularly if a contact is detected. In this paper, our work on real-time human robot collision avoidance is presented. Unlike the existing solutions, in our method the robot is provided with agile reactivity to human presence. The system is engineered to achieve natural collision avoidance behavior. As a result, the robot acts with smooth avoidance motion upon the proximity of human, giving him/her the space required to do his/her work in shared tasks between a human co-worker and robot.