Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2208.02010

Vision-Based Safety System for Barrierless Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents and the need for solutions that ensure a safe Human-Robot Collaboration. This paper proposes a safety system that implements Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) type of operation. For this, safety zones are defined in the robot's workspace following current standards for industrial collaborative robots. A deep learning-based computer vision system detects, tracks, and estimates the 3D position of operators close to the robot. The robot control system receives the operator's 3D position and generates 3D representations of them in a simulation environment. Depending on the zone where the closest operator was detected, the robot stops or changes its operating speed. Three different operation modes in which the human and robot interact are presented. Results show that the vision-based system can correctly detect and classify in which safety zone an operator is located and that the different proposed operation modes ensure that the robot's reaction and stop time are within the required time limits to guarantee safety.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Lina María Amaya-Mejía, Nicolás Duque-Suárez, Daniel Jaramillo-Ramírez, Carol Martinez. 2022-08-03. Vision-Based Safety System for Barrierless Human-Robot Collaboration. https://doi.org/10.1109/iros47612.2022.9981689

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

A Scalable Multi-Robot Framework for Decentralized and Asynchronous Perception-Action-Communication Loops

We develop a decentralized Perception-Action-Communication (PAC) system for multi-robot teams that enables them to collaborate in large scale, outdoor environments. Our system natively supports deployments at any scale by leveraging a graph neural network (GNN) to diffuse information hop-by-hop across the fleet's network. This achieves global collaboration from individual robots limited to local sensing and communication. Fully asynchronous, the core modules of PAC: perception, inter-robot communication, message aggregation and action are clocked at different frequencies with information flowing between them through buffers. We implement the PAC system as a series of highly extensible ROS2 nodes to serve as the foundational infrastructure for deployable swarm systems. PAC is validated in the real world with outdoor experiments with up to N=20 quadrotor robots and in simulations based on real-world data with up to N=100. These validations show that our system upholds crucial properties for field-deployable robot collectives: scalability, resiliency and repeatability.

cs.RO↗

DexWrist: A Robotic Wrist for Constrained and Dynamic Manipulation

Development of dexterous manipulation hardware has primarily focused on hands and grippers. However, these end-effectors are often paired with bulky and highly stiff wrists that limit performance in human environments. More recent designs have adopted backdrivable actuation, but are still difficult to model and control due to coupled kinematics or high mechanical inertia from heavy links. We present DexWrist, a compact robotic wrist combining quasi-direct-drive actuation with a decoupled parallel kinematic mechanism to advance manipulation in highly constrained environments and enable dynamic, contact-rich tasks. It delivers 3.75$\pm$0.05 Nm rated torque, 0.33$\pm$0.06 Nm backdrive torque, 10.15$\pm$1.34 Hz torque bandwidth, $\pm 40^\circ$ ROM in both DOFs, and a diagonal velocity-constraint Jacobian (one-to-one motor-to-DOF mapping) in a 0.97 kg package. In practice, these properties increase workspace in clutter and stabilize contact without finely tuned admittance control. We evaluate DexWrist as a drop-in upgrade in simulation and on three robot arms across constrained and contact-rich tasks. In learned policy evaluations on the AgileX PiPER and UR3e, DexWrist achieved 50-76% relative improvements in success rate and reduced autonomous task completion times by 3-5x; on a torque-controlled Franka FR3, where a strong joint-impedance baseline already succeeds, it still completed the task 1.4x faster. Project page and videos: https://martinpeticco.com/dexwrist

cs.RO↗

Imagine2Act: Leveraging Object-Action Motion Consistency from Imagined Goals for Robotic Manipulation

Relational object rearrangement (ROR) tasks (e.g., insert flower to vase) require a robot to manipulate objects with precise semantic and geometric reasoning. Existing approaches either rely on pre-collected demonstrations that struggle to capture complex geometric constraints or generate goal-state observations to capture semantic and geometric knowledge, but fail to explicitly couple object transformation with action prediction, resulting in errors due to generative noise. To address these limitations, we propose Imagine2Act, a 3D imitation-learning framework that incorporates semantic and geometric constraints of objects into policy learning to tackle high-precision manipulation tasks. We first generate imagined goal images conditioned on language instructions and reconstruct corresponding 3D point clouds to provide robust semantic and geometric priors. These imagined goal point clouds serve as additional inputs to the policy model, while an object-action consistency strategy with soft pose supervision explicitly aligns predicted end-effector motion with generated object transformation. This design enables Imagine2Act to reason about semantic and geometric relationships between objects and predict accurate actions across diverse tasks. Experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that Imagine2Act outperforms previous state-of-the-art policies. More visualizations can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/imagine2act.

cs.RO↗