Depth camera based collision avoidance via active robot control

A new type of depth cameras can improve the effectiveness of safety monitoring in human–robot collaborative environment. Especially on today's manufacturing shop floors, safe human–robot collaboration is of paramount importance for enhanced work efficiency, flexibility, and overall productivity. Within this context, this paper presents a depth camera based approach for cost-effective real-time safety monitoring of a human–robot collaborative assembly cell. The approach is further demonstrated in adaptive robot control. Stationary and known objects are first removed from the scene for efficient detection of obstacles in a monitored area. The collision detection is processed between a virtual model driven by real sensors, and 3D point cloud data of obstacles to allow different safety scenarios. The results show that this approach can be applied to real-time work cell monitoring.