Method to Integrate Human Simulation into Gazebo for Human-robot Collaboration

Abstract

Abstract The human-robot collaboration (HRC) takes the advantages of both the flexibility of human workers and the accuracy of robots. Simulation is an effective and economical method to verify the safety and reliability of the HRC system. This paper presents an approach to integrate the simulation of human workers into a robot simulation environment. A digital human model is built in the robot simulator Gazebo and can be controlled by data from proprietary software for human workflow planning. As a result, a holistic HRC scenario is established in Gazebo, which provides the potential for workspace monitoring and robot collision-free trajectory planning based on the Robot Operating System (ROS).