Safe human-robot-cooperation: problem analysis, system concept and fast sensor fusion

We present a system concept allowing humans to work safely in the same environment as a robot manipulator. Several cameras survey the common workspace. A look-up-table-based fusion algorithm is used to back-project directly from the image spaces of the cameras to the manipulator´s configuration space. In the look-up-tables both, the camera calibration and the robot geometry are implicitly encoded. For experiments, a conventional 6 axis industrial manipulator is used. The work space is surveyed by four grayscale cameras. Due to the limits of present robot controllers, the computationally expensive parts of the system are executed on a server PC that communicates with the robot controller via Ethernet.