Survey and Planning of High-Payload Human-Robot Collaboration: Multi-modal Communication Based on Sensor Fusion

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has gained increased attention with the widespread commissioning and usage of collaborative robots. However, recent studies show that the fenceless collaborative robots are not as harmless as they look like. In addition, collaborative robots usually have a very limited payload (up to 12 kg), which is not satisfactory for most of the industrial applications. To use high-payload industrial robots in HRC, today’s safety systems has only one option, limiting speeds of robot motion execution and redundant systems for supervision of forces. The reduction of execution speed, reduces efficiency, which limits more widespread of automation. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose novel sensor fusion of different safety related sensors and combine these in a way that they ensure safety, while the human operator can focus on task execution and communicate with the system in a natural way. Different communication channels are explored (multi-modal) and demonstration scenarios are presented.