Towards Safe Speed and Separation Monitoring in Human-Robot Collaboration with 3D-Time-of-Flight Cameras

Human-robot collaboration plays a strong role in industrial production processes. The ISO/TS 15066 defines four different methods of collaboration between humans and robots. So far, there was no robotic system available that incorporates all four collaboration methods at once. Especially for the speed and separation monitoring, there was no sensor system available that can easily be attached directly to an off-the-shelf industrial robot arm and that is capable of detecting obstacles in distances from a few millimeters up to five meters. This paper presented first results of using a 3D time-of-flight camera directly on an industrial robot arm for obstacle detection in human-robot collaboration. We attached a Visionary-T camera from SICK to the flange of a KUKA LBR iiwa 7 R800. With Matlab, we evaluated the pictures and found that it works very well for detecting obstacles in a distance range starting from 0.5 m and up to 5 m.