Radar Sensor for Fenceless Machine Guarding and Collaborative Robotics

In industrial environments, ensuring machine safety without physical obstruction and enabling human-robot collaboration brings obvious productivity and profitability advantages. Present safety standards for collaborative robots envision a number of safe operations. One of them is speed and separation monitoring (SSM), which requires a sensing system for estimating the operator position. Traditionally, laser scanners have been used to safeguard a predefined number of zones around dangerous machinery or as SSM sensors. In this paper, we present a radar-based sensor for fenceless safety and collaborative operation. By using radar technology, the proposed demonstrator overcomes the limitations exhibited by optical safety devices in presence of strong light, dirt, dust or simply poorly reflecting surfaces. The measured static and dynamic characteristics of the sensor are comparable to those of state-of-the-art laser scanners. In addition, advanced signal processing allows to perform operations such as trajectory estimation and target classification, enabling smart triggering.