Capturing Human-Machine Interaction Events from Radio Sensors in Industry 4.0 Environments

In manufacturing environments, human workers interact with increasingly autonomous machinery. To ensure workspace safety and production efficiency during human-robot cooperation, continuous and accurate tracking and perception of workers’ activities is required. The RadioSense project intends to move forward the state-of-the-art in advanced sensing and perception for next generation manufacturing workspace. In this paper, we describe our ongoing efforts towards multi-subject recognition cases with multiple persons conducting several simultaneous activities. Perturbations induced by moving bodies/objects on the electromagnetic wavefield can be processed for environmental perception by leveraging next generation (5G) New Radio (NR) technologies, including MIMO systems, high performance edge-cloud computing and novel (or custom designed) deep learning tools.