Robot Safety Monitoring using Programmable Light Curtains

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ram, Karnik, Aggarwal, Shobhit, Tamburo, Robert, Ancha, Siddharth, Narasimhan, Srinivasa
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916193384792064
author Ram, Karnik
Aggarwal, Shobhit
Tamburo, Robert
Ancha, Siddharth
Narasimhan, Srinivasa
author_facet Ram, Karnik
Aggarwal, Shobhit
Tamburo, Robert
Ancha, Siddharth
Narasimhan, Srinivasa
contents As factories continue to evolve into collaborative spaces with multiple robots working together with human supervisors in the loop, ensuring safety for all actors involved becomes critical. Currently, laser-based light curtain sensors are widely used in factories for safety monitoring. While these conventional safety sensors meet high accuracy standards, they are difficult to reconfigure and can only monitor a fixed user-defined region of space. Furthermore, they are typically expensive. Instead, we leverage a controllable depth sensor, programmable light curtains (PLC), to develop an inexpensive and flexible real-time safety monitoring system for collaborative robot workspaces. Our system projects virtual dynamic safety envelopes that tightly envelop the moving robot at all times and detect any objects that intrude the envelope. Furthermore, we develop an instrumentation algorithm that optimally places (multiple) PLCs in a workspace to maximize the visibility coverage of robots. Our work enables fence-less human-robot collaboration, while scaling to monitor multiple robots with few sensors. We analyze our system in a real manufacturing testbed with four robot arms and demonstrate its capabilities as a fast, accurate, and inexpensive safety monitoring solution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_03556
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robot Safety Monitoring using Programmable Light Curtains
Ram, Karnik
Aggarwal, Shobhit
Tamburo, Robert
Ancha, Siddharth
Narasimhan, Srinivasa
Robotics
As factories continue to evolve into collaborative spaces with multiple robots working together with human supervisors in the loop, ensuring safety for all actors involved becomes critical. Currently, laser-based light curtain sensors are widely used in factories for safety monitoring. While these conventional safety sensors meet high accuracy standards, they are difficult to reconfigure and can only monitor a fixed user-defined region of space. Furthermore, they are typically expensive. Instead, we leverage a controllable depth sensor, programmable light curtains (PLC), to develop an inexpensive and flexible real-time safety monitoring system for collaborative robot workspaces. Our system projects virtual dynamic safety envelopes that tightly envelop the moving robot at all times and detect any objects that intrude the envelope. Furthermore, we develop an instrumentation algorithm that optimally places (multiple) PLCs in a workspace to maximize the visibility coverage of robots. Our work enables fence-less human-robot collaboration, while scaling to monitor multiple robots with few sensors. We analyze our system in a real manufacturing testbed with four robot arms and demonstrate its capabilities as a fast, accurate, and inexpensive safety monitoring solution.
title Robot Safety Monitoring using Programmable Light Curtains
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03556