Collision-free path planning based on new navigation function for an industrial robotic manipulator in human-robot coexistence environments

Abstract

This paper presents a method for real-time collision-free path planning that uses a new navigation function for environments in which humans and robots cooperate or coexist, which guarantees the safety of a human operator who works with a collaborative robot. This method follows 10 skeletal joints in a human operator, which are detected using an RGB-D sensor, in order to detect humans. A new navigation function ensures collision-free planning for a robotic manipulator that avoids local minima and generates a shorter path. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison to two existing methods. The applicability and practicability of the proposed method are demonstrated by experiments using a 6-DoF industrial manipulator HIWIN RA605 with an RGB-D vision sensor (Kinect V1), a real-time operation system extension (RTX64) and an EtherCAT network protocol.