Human-Robot Collaboration: Safety by Design

Abstract

High payload industrial robots, unlike collaborative robots are not designed to work together with humans. Collaboration can only happen in situations, where the human and robot is separated with a distance, which allows safety sensors to stop the robot system in any point if the human is in too close proximity of the robot. Safety sensors cannot decide over risks, consequences, neither any counter measures to prevent undesired outcome (e.g. collision between human and robot). Safety sensors are only reacting on proximity and can only give severity signal to the robotic system (e.g. no human, slow speed, full stop). This paper presents a new way to address safety sensors: voxel based, dynamic, collision state-space monitoring for human-robot collaboration with high payload robots. The general architecture and some initial test are presented, along with introduction of the problem statement.