Real-time human collision detection for industrial robot cells

Abstract

A collision detection system triggering on human motion was developed using the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Point Cloud Library (PCL). ROS was used as the core of the programs and for the communication with an industrial robot. Combining the depths fields from the 3D cameras was accomplished by the use of PCL. The library was also the underlying tool for segmenting the human from the registrated point clouds. Benchmarking of several collision algorithms was done in order to compare the solution. The registration process gave satisfactory results when testing the repetitiveness and the accuracy of the implementation. The segmentation algorithm was able to segment a person represented by 4–6000 points in real-time successfully.