プログラマブルライトカーテンによるロボット安全監視
Robot Safety Monitoring using Programmable Light Curtains
可制御な深度センサ（プログラマブルライトカーテン）を使い、協働ロボットの動きに合わせた仮想安全エンベロープを投影して侵入物を検知する、安価で柔軟なリアルタイム安全監視システムを開発した。
著者: Karnik Ram, Shobhit Aggarwal, Robert Tamburo, Siddharth Ancha, Srinivasa Narasimhan
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
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.
