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arXiv · 2110.12940

CoboGuider: Haptic Potential Fields for Safe Human-Robot Interaction

Viktor Rakhmatulin·Miguel Altamirano Cabrera·Fikre Hagos·Oleg Sautenkov·Jonathan Tirado·Ighor Uzhinsky·Dzmitry Tsetserukou
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Abstract

Modern industry still relies on manual manufacturing operations and safe human-robot interaction is of great interest nowadays. Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) allows close and efficient collaborative scenarios by maintaining a protective separation distance during robot operation. The paper focuses on a novel approach to strengthen the SSM safety requirements by introducing haptic feedback to a robotic cell worker. Tactile stimuli provide early warning of dangerous movements and proximity to the robot, based on the human reaction time and instantaneous velocities of robot and operator. A preliminary experiment was performed to identify the reaction time of participants when they are exposed to tactile stimuli in a collaborative environment with controlled conditions. In a second experiment, we evaluated our approach into a study case where human worker and cobot performed collaborative planetary gear assembly. Results show that the applied approach increased the average minimum distance between the robot's end-effector and hand by 44% compared to the operator relying only on the visual feedback. Moreover, the participants without the haptic support have failed several times to maintain the protective separation distance.

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Viktor Rakhmatulin, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Fikre Hagos, Oleg Sautenkov, Jonathan Tirado, Ighor Uzhinsky, Dzmitry Tsetserukou. 2021-10-25. CoboGuider: Haptic Potential Fields for Safe Human-Robot Interaction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12940

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