Abstract

The paradigm shift from mass production to mass customization is leading to new requirements in today's manufacturing environment. Especially in manual manufacturing processes, these requirements are characterized by high-cost pressure, increasing variant diversity and required lot size. In contrast to full-automation settings with industrial robots, human-robot collaboration offers the potential to design adaptable hybrid solutions and generate individual levels of automation in rapidly changing production lines. The safety of the operator in collaborative robot applications is one of the key factors for facilitating their use in industrial practice. This paper addresses this issue and presents a solution for safe human-robot collaboration using a top-view RGB-D camera system that continuously monitors the shared workspace. Based on the detection of visual markers and human hand tracking, different safety strategies according to DIN ISO/TS 15066 are implemented and successively compared in a paradigmatic assembly scenario as a part of a user study with 12 test persons. The utilized safety strategies include safety-rated monitored stop, speed and separation monitoring, and active contact prevention. Compared to the incorporated safety features of collaborative robots, the results show that the acceptance and fluency of collaborative robot applications improves, but the execution time increases at the same time.

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