Human-robot cooperation: Safe Pick-and-Place Operations

Abstract- We present an industrial robot system whose workspace is supervised by several stationary cameras to ensure safe human-robot cooperations. All robot transfer motions are checked for collision by detecting obstacles using a difference image method. Whenever a collision is detected, the robot motion path is changed accordingly. The presented algorithm enables robots to perform safe pick-and-place operations exhibiting real time behaviour through efficient image processing. Index Terms- human-robot cooperation, industrial robot, workspace supervision, difference image, reference image update, solid modelling I

Multi-Camera Collision Detection allowing for Object Occlusions

A multi-camera-based collision detection system is presented. We describe the computation of global collision information for the entire surveilled workspace based on local collision information extracted from camera images. If there are known occlusions (e.g., by the robot), the system is able to recover object collision information by fusing multiple camera images. The algorithm presented is part of the safety system of a prototype realizing human-robot-cooperation