CoboGuider: Haptic Potential Fields for Safe Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoboGuider, a haptic feedback system that enhances safety in human-robot collaboration by providing tactile warnings, significantly increasing the minimum separation distance and reducing safety failures during tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel haptic feedback approach integrated into SSM to improve safety and human response in collaborative robotic tasks.

Findings

Haptic feedback increased minimum separation distance by 44%.

Participants with haptic support maintained safer distances.

Without haptic feedback, participants failed to maintain safety.

Abstract

Modern industry still relies on manual manufacturing operations and safe human-robot interaction is of great interest nowadays. Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) allows close and efficient collaborative scenarios by maintaining a protective separation distance during robot operation. The paper focuses on a novel approach to strengthen the SSM safety requirements by introducing haptic feedback to a robotic cell worker. Tactile stimuli provide early warning of dangerous movements and proximity to the robot, based on the human reaction time and instantaneous velocities of robot and operator. A preliminary experiment was performed to identify the reaction time of participants when they are exposed to tactile stimuli in a collaborative environment with controlled conditions. In a second experiment, we evaluated our approach into a study case where human worker and cobot performed collaborative planetary gear assembly. Results show that the applied approach increased the average minimum distance between the robot's end-effector and hand by 44% compared to the operator relying only on the visual feedback. Moreover, the participants without the haptic support have failed several times to maintain the protective separation distance.