Virtual reality for improving safety and collaborative control of industrial robots

Abstract

Some industrial jobs are particularly difficult. Operators must work in noisy or risk-filled environment and achieve repetitive motion or carry heavy loads which may cause repetitive strain injury (RSI). One approach to fulfill these arduous tasks is to use cobots, a neologism for "cooperation" and "robotics". Cobotics refers to collaboration between a person and a robot in a same area. The main idea is to help the operator to realize hard work. For this kind of collaboration it is necessary to work in safe conditions and new robots have been built for this purpose. The main issue of these robots is that they are secure thanks to post-collisions algorithms. To improve the safety, pre-collision algorithms need to be developed and that's what this paper tends to propose. Thanks to virtual reality tools, it is now possible to secure an area and act on the robots before any injury occurs. The low-cost system we propose here allows to improve the safety of industrial robots thanks to new virtual reality device like a Kinect2. We also propose a solution of intelligent learning of new tasks for robots.