A system for human-in-the-loop simulation of industrial collaborative robot applications

Abstract

As full automation is often not achievable in flexible production, collaborative robot systems offer potential for an increase in productivity for manual systems. These systems however pose great challenges concerning planning and engineering. We define main requirements for industrial human robot collaboration simulation. It is found that current simulation systems in research and industry cannot sufficiently support the digital planning of such systems. We introduce a framework for a human-in-the-loop system capable of simulation and virtual commissioning of industrial collaborative robot systems. For this, we implement a combined virtual reality, motion capturing and object tracking architecture into an industry standard robot simulation software. We validate our system on real use cases from power electronics production implementing real safety controllers and evaluate the fulfillment of the defined requirements.