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

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-DoFs 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.