RFID based-human localization in robot-cells for a better shared workspace interaction

Industrial robots have become a vital part of automation in industries performing operations like stacking, casting, painting, sorting, welding etc. The basic sensory abilities in most cases needs operating these robots inside robot fences which separate the operator from the robot. But now this line of separation is becoming thin and work environments are being designed for collaborative tasks involving both human and robot participation. This transformation demands for systems that ensure the safety of the operator inside the work environment. We have designed and implemented a new localization method for the industrial robot environments using RFID technology. The entire system is implemented as a ROS based package to facilitate integration and experimentation in broad range of robot architectures. We have also developed a real time 3D visualization of the monitored work environment in RViz for displaying sensor data and state information from ROS. The system provides good real time response and proves to be a cost efficient and scalable method for human localization in robot-cells.

[1]  Hamid D. Taghirad,et al.  Parallel Robots: Mechanics and Control , 2013 .

[2]  B. Scassellati,et al.  Challenges in Shared-Environment Human-Robot Collaboration , 2013 .

[3]  Mike Hazas,et al.  A Novel Broadband Ultrasonic Location System , 2002, UbiComp.

[4]  Hiroyuki Morikawa,et al.  DOLPHIN: an autonomous indoor positioning system in ubiquitous computing environment , 2003, Proceedings IEEE Workshop on Software Technologies for Future Embedded Systems. WSTFES 2003.

[5]  Tarek M. Sobh,et al.  Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators , 2003 .

[6]  Hiroyuki Morikawa,et al.  DOLPHIN: A Practical Approach for Implementing a Fully Distributed Indoor Ultrasonic Positioning System , 2004, UbiComp.

[7]  James H. Graham,et al.  A Safety and Collision Avoidance System for Industrial Robots , 1986, IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications.

[8]  Satoru Goto,et al.  Trajectory Planning for Industrial Robot Manipulators Considering Assigned Velocity and Allowance Under Joint Acceleration Limit , 2003 .

[9]  Andy Hopper,et al.  Broadband ultrasonic location systems for improved indoor positioning , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[10]  Paolo Rocco,et al.  Towards safe human-robot interaction in robotic cells: An approach based on visual tracking and intention estimation , 2011, 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[11]  Aude Billard,et al.  A survey of Tactile Human-Robot Interactions , 2010, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[12]  Yunhao Liu,et al.  VIRE: Active RFID-based Localization Using Virtual Reference Elimination , 2007, 2007 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2007).

[13]  Dinesh Verma,et al.  A survey of sensor selection schemes in wireless sensor networks , 2007, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[14]  Yunhao Liu,et al.  LANDMARC: Indoor Location Sensing Using Active RFID , 2004, Proceedings of the First IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2003. (PerCom 2003)..

[15]  Yunhao Liu,et al.  ANDMARC: Indoor Location Sensing Using Active RFID , 2003, PerCom.

[16]  M. Bolic,et al.  Novel Semi-Passive RFID System for Indoor Localization , 2013, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[17]  Andy Hopper,et al.  The active badge location system , 1992, TOIS.

[18]  Norbert Elkmann,et al.  Tactile sensing: A key technology for safe physical human robot interaction , 2011, 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[19]  Bodhi Priyantha,et al.  The Cricket indoor location system , 2005 .

[20]  Przemyslaw A. Lasota,et al.  Toward safe close-proximity human-robot interaction with standard industrial robots , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).

[21]  Xiuwen Liu,et al.  Accurate localization of RFID tags using phase difference , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on RFID (IEEE RFID 2010).