Analysis of Safe Ultrawideband Human-Robot Communication in Automated Collaborative Warehouse

TL;DR

This paper analyzes ultrawideband signal propagation in automated warehouses to optimize human-robot communication safety, considering environmental factors and antenna placement through detailed simulations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive propagation analysis and guidelines for antenna positioning to enhance safe ultrawideband communication in warehouse environments.

Findings

Path loss profiles vary with rack configurations and antenna polarizations.

Surface roughness impacts signal propagation and must be considered.

Optimal antenna placement improves communication safety and reliability.

Abstract

The paper presents the propagation analysis of ultrawideband Gaussian signal in an automated collaborative warehouse environment where human and robots communicate to ensure that mutual collisions do not occur. The warehouse racks are principally modeled as clusters of metallic (PEC) parallelepipeds, with dimensions chosen to approximate the realistic warehouse. The signal propagation is analyzed using a ray tracing software, with the goal to calculate the path loss profile for different representative scenarios and antenna polarizations. The influence of the rack surface roughness onto propagation is also analyzed. The guidelines for optimum antenna positions on humans and robots for safe communication are proposed according to the simulations results.