A sensor framework for human-robot collaboration in industrial robot work-cell

In the manufacturing industry, both humans and robots are required in various phases of its operations. While a robot can do complicated tasks repeatedly and precisely, humans are required for strategic analysis and spontaneous decision-making. Safety of the human operator is one of the most important challenges in such a collaborative system. The paper reviews existing collaboration techniques for industrial manipulators and propose a simple and low cost sensor based collaborative framework for human safety. An ultrasonic radar with passive infrared sensors are used to detect human activity in the robot work cell. The sensor framework is designed and validated for its accuracy and response time. The functionality of the system with the manipulator has been verified for a pick and place operation running in ROS based simulation.