No abstract

No abstract

In the EU project SHAREWORK, methods are developed that allow humans and robots to collaborate in an industrial environment. One of the major contributions is a framework for task planning coupled with automated item detection and localization. In this work, we present the methods used for detecting and classifying items on the shop floor. Important in the context of SHAREWORK is the user-friendliness of the methodology. Thus, we renounce heavy-learning-based methods in favor of unsupervised segmentation coupled with lenient machine learning methods for classification. Our algorithm is a combination of established methods adjusted for fast and reliable item detection at high ranges of up to eight meters. In this work, we present the full pipeline from calibration, over segmentation to item classification in the industrial context. The pipeline is validated on a shop floor of 40 sqm and with up to nine different items and assemblies, reaching a mean accuracy of 84% at 0.85 Hz.

Safety is a central challenge in human-robot collaboration. Particularly in higher collaboration levels, separating safety devices, such as fences, are no longer needed and must be replaced by intelligent sensor-based systems. Of particular interest is the adaptive speed control of the robot. This work presents a methodology to adaptively control the end-effector velocity of the robot based on the distances to dynamic environmental objects. The method combines distance measurement and environmental subtraction with conservative velocity estimation using robot-specific stopping distances and is available in real-time. Data acquisition is performed using a co-moving 3D camera sensor attached to the robot structure.

Cyber-Physical Systems constitute one of the core concepts in Industry 4.0 aiming at realizing production systems that combine the efforts of human workers, robots, and intelligent entities. This is particularly crucial in Human-Robot Collaboration manufacturing where a tight peer-to-peer interaction between humans and intelligent autonomous robots is necessary. The work proposes the integration of novel Artificial Intelligence technologies to enhance the flexibility and adaptability of collaborative robots. The integrated functionalities allow a collaborative robot to autonomously recognize the tasks a human worker performs, and accordingly adapt its behavior. The approach is deployed on a real HRC scenario showing the functioning of the developed cognitive capabilities and the increased flexibility of resulting collaborations.