Cognitive Robotics in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Industrial robotics is a challenging domain for cognitive systems, especially, when human intelligence meets solid machinery with many degrees of freedom like most of today's industrial robots. Hence, for guaranteeing safety for human workers, safety fences are installed to separate humans and robots. As consequence no time and space sharing interaction or cooperation can be found in industrial robotics. Some progress has gained in the past to the extent that some modern working cells are equipped with laser scanners performing foreground detection. But with these systems one is not able to know what is going on in the scene and, therefore, could not contribute something meaningful for challenging tasks like safe human-robot cooperation. We are conducting research on reconstruction of human kinematics based on 3D imaging sensors. The resulting kinematical model is tracked and fused with knowledge about robot kinematics and surrounding objects into an environmental model. This allows for efficient risk estimation and subsequent risk minimization through adaption of robot motion. Based on these processing steps, recognition of and reasoning about actions and situations in a human centred production environment is performed. All components and modules are merged into a single framework for human-robot cooperation (MAROCO), in order to pave the way for interactive and cooperative scenarios.