Preliminary Study of a Novel Magnetic Sensor for Safety in Industrial Robotics

In this paper a novel magnetic sensor for industrial robotics is presented. The main aim of the sensor is to detect the presence of human beings in order to avoid the collision between workers and the robot. The sensor consists in such an artificial skin to conform at the robot shape, made by several turns of a wire covered by a dielectric. The sensor made in this way has no exposed metal parts, so it is safe from an electrical point of view and has no tips that could be caught up by surrounding objects. This sensor in mainly based to the magnetic field variation due to the presence of the target. At first, a laboratory prototype of this sensor was built to perform a preliminary set of measurements. Furtherly a prototype implementation was realized and tested in a realistic scenario.