A Distributed Computing Real-Time Safety System of Collaborative Robot

Robotization has become common in modern factories due to its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Lots of robots and manipulators share their workspaces with humans what could lead to hazardous situations causing health damage or even death. This article presents a real-time safety system applying the distributed computing paradigm for a collaborative robot. The system consists of detection/sensing modules connected with a server working as decision-making system. Each configurable sensing module pre-processes vision information and then sends to the server the images cropped to new objects extracted from a background. After identifying persons from the images, the decision-making system sends a request to the robot to perform pre-defined action. In the proposed solution, there are indicated three safety zones defined by three different actions on a robot motion. As identification method, state-of-the-art of Machine Learning algorithms, the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Viola-Jones, and You Only Look Once (YOLO), have been examined and presented. The industrial environment tests indicated that YOLOv3 algorithm outperformed other solutions in terms of identification capabilities, false positive rate and maximum latency.open access