2021/10/25 by Viktor Rakhmatulin, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Rakhmatulin, Viktor +11
Engineering · Neuroscience · Psychology · #EEG and Brain-Computer Interfaces #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Automation Interaction and Safety #Muscle activation and electromyography studies #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.12940
openalex publication_date 2021/10/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Modern industry still relies on manual manufacturing operations and safe human-robot interaction is of great interest nowadays. Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) allows close and efficient collaborative scenarios by maintaining a protective separation distance during robot operation. The paper focuses on a novel approach to strengthen the SSM safety requirements by introducing haptic feedback to a robotic cell worker. Tactile stimuli provide early warning of dangerous movements and proximity to the robot, based on the human reaction time and instantaneous velocities of robot and operator. A preliminary experiment was performed to identify the reaction time of participants when they are exposed to tactile stimuli in a collaborative environment with controlled conditions. In a second experiment, we evaluated our approach into a study case where human worker and cobot performed collaborative planetary gear assembly. Results show that the applied approach increased the average minimum distance between the robot's end-effector and hand by 44% compared to the operator relying only on the visual feedback. Moreover, the participants without the haptic support have failed several times to maintain the protective separation distance.