Safe Human Robot Collaboration : By using laser scanners, robot safety monitoring system and trap routine speed control

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, robot is commonly used to perform automation tasks. With the trend of low volume and customised products, flexible manufacturing is introduced to increase working efficiency and flexibility. Therefore, human robot collaboration plays an important role in automation production and safety should be considered in the design of this kind of robot cell. This work presents the design of safe human robot collaboration by equipping an industrial robot cell with SICK laser scanners, safety monitoring system and trap routine speed control. It also investigates the reliability of RGB-D camera for robot safety. This work aims to find a safety robot system using standard industrial robot for human robot collaboration. The challenge is to ensure the operator's safety at all times. It investigates safety standards and directives, safety requirements of collaboration, and related works for the design of collaborative robot cell, and makes risk assessment before carrying out the valuation. Based on literature review, it gives the concept of layout design and logic for slow down and resume of robot motion. The speed will be first reduced to manual speed and then zero speed depending on the distance between the human and the robot. Valuation and verification are made in the proposed safe solution for human robot collaboration to test the reliability and feasibility. This project realizes the automatic resume that the robot can con-tinue working without manually pressing reset button after the operator leaves the robot cell if there is no access to the prohibited area. In addition, it also adopts the manual reset at the same time to ensure the safety when people access the prohibited area. Several special cases that may happen in the human robot collaboration are described and analysed. Furthermore, the future work is presented to make improvements for the proposed safety robot cell design.