Reliable Workspace Monitoring in Safe Human-Robot Environment

Abstract

The implementation of a reliable vision system for full perception of the human-robot environment is a key issue for the flexible collaborative production industries, especially for the frequently changing applications. The use of such system facilitates the perception and recognition of the human activity, and consequently highly increases the robustness and reactivity of safety strategies in collaborative tasks. This paper presents an implementation of several techniques for workspace monitoring in collaborative human-robot applications. A reliable perception of the overall environment is performed to generate a consistent point cloud which is used for human detection and tracking. Additionally, safety strategies on the robotic system (reduced velocity, emergency stop, ...) are activated when the human-robot distance approaches predefined security thresholds.