A Multisensory Edge-Cloud Platform for Opportunistic Radio Sensing in Cobot Environments

TL;DR

This paper presents a multisensory edge-cloud IoT platform that fuses radio, imaging, radar, and infrared data for real-time, passive worker monitoring in collaborative robot environments, enhancing safety and detection accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multisensor data fusion platform leveraging edge-cloud architecture for passive worker detection in industrial cobot settings, integrating diverse sensing technologies and machine learning.

Findings

Effective real-time worker detection demonstrated in industrial scenarios.

Fusion of radio, imaging, radar, and infrared data improves safety monitoring.

Platform achieves low latency and high detection reliability.

Abstract

Worker monitoring and protection in collaborative robot (cobots) industrial environments requires advanced sensing capabilities and flexible solutions to monitor the movements of the operator in close proximity of moving robots. Collaborative robotics is an active research area where Internet of Things (IoT) and novel sensing technologies are expected to play a critical role. Considering that no single technology can currently solve the problem of continuous worker monitoring, the paper targets the development of an IoT multisensor data fusion (MDF) platform. It is based on an edge-cloud architecture that supports the combination and transformation of multiple sensing technologies to enable the passive and anonymous detection of workers. Multidimensional data acquisition from different IoT sources, signal pre-processing, feature extraction, data distribution and fusion, along with machine learning (ML) and computing methods are described. The proposed IoT platform also comprises a practical solution for data fusion and analytics. It is able to perform opportunistic and real-time perception of workers by fusing and analyzing radio signals obtained from several interconnected IoT components, namely a multi-antenna WiFi installation (2.4-5 GHz), a sub-THz imaging camera (100 GHz), a network of radars (122 GHz) and infrared sensors (8-13 {\mu}m). The performance of the proposed IoT platform is validated through real use case scenarios inside a pilot industrial plant in which protective human--robot distance must be guaranteed considering latency and detection uncertainties.