ArUcoGlide: a Novel Wearable Robot for Position Tracking and Haptic Feedback to Increase Safety During Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces ArUcoGlide, a wearable robot system with tracking and haptic feedback designed to improve safety and efficiency in human-robot collaboration, validated through three experimental evaluations.

Contribution

It presents a novel wearable robot framework with integrated tracking and collision avoidance, enhancing safety and performance in collaborative human-robot tasks.

Findings

Reduces operation time by 16%

Increases average distance between user and robot by 5 cm

Achieves accurate hand tracking with low latency

Abstract

The current capabilities of robotic systems make human collaboration necessary to accomplish complex tasks effectively. In this work, we are introducing a framework to ensure safety in a human-robot collaborative environment. The system is composed of a wearable 2-DOF robot, a low-cost and easy-to-install tracking system, and a collision avoidance algorithm based on the Artificial Potential Field (APF). The wearable robot is designed to hold a fiducial marker and maintain its visibility to the tracking system, which, in turn, localizes the user's hand with good accuracy and low latency and provides haptic feedback to the user. The system is designed to enhance the performance of collaborative tasks while ensuring user safety. Three experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The first one evaluated the accuracy of the tracking system. The second experiment analyzed human-robot behavior during an imminent collision. The third experiment evaluated the system in a collaborative activity in a shared working environment. The results show that the implementation of the introduced system reduces the operation time by 16% and increases the average distance between the user's hand and the robot by 5 cm.