Safety System for Industrial Robots Based on Human Detection Using an RGB-D Camera

A robotic system, in general, should be safe for the operators who are using it and, if possible, it should be safe for the system itself and the environment it interacts with. This paper investigates three methods for human detection by an RGB-D camera and their adjustments for monitored robot movement. The methods are implemented in ROS and integrated into a robotic system consisting of an industrial robot arm ABB IRB-2400L and an RGB-D camera. Validation and comparison of the implemented algorithms was performed on the recorded video dataset containing people in the robot working area with per-frame annotations of human presence, velocity and proximity to the robot. The algorithms detect humans with highest recall of 98%.