Cooperation between man and robot: interface and safety

The question of robot safety become increasingly important as future robots will be required to share their working area with humans in order to achieve a fruitful cooperation. The robot´s contribution could be restricted to the laborious and repetitive work, whereas the human acts as a supervisor and handles exceptions. A new safety system has been developed which allows such a close interaction. One module has the task to localize people inside the working area and provide the robot with an appropriate behavior pattern in order to avoid situations endangering the operator. This module uses a camera and computer vision techniques to obtain the location of the operator. The other module of the safety system has to prevent a robot runaway, which can be defined as an unexpected robot motion due to a failure of robot hardware or software. Speech recognition is used as interface between operator and robot. A dedicated robot-control structure has been implemented permitting a fast and safe intervention of the operator by means of the speech system