Efficient and safe interaction

between humans and

intelligent production plants


The inclusion of humans into the production process leads to high demands for employed safety measures. Collaboration (and interaction) between the plant and human operators can possibly lead to injuries, if appropriate measures are missing. Obviously, the most important requirement for the development of safety concepts is therefore the minimization of critical incident probability, in which the human operator is harmed.

Within the project, an architecture for HRC is implemented, where the future behavior of the operator has to be known only for reasons of efficiency but not to establish the overall safety of the system. Two subsystems are defined and will be implemented in which (a) the Optimizing Strategic Control (OSC) increases the availability and reliability based on learning principles for derivation of control strategies (non safety-critical) and (b) the independent Fail-Safe Control (FSC) ensures the overall safety of the system.

Due to appropriate measures given in the FSC, the pro-active safety behavior of the OSC needs not to be proven and cannot harm the overall safety of the system. This allows for the prediction of the operator’s future behavior and to gear the robot behavior towards efficiency of production without harming the overall safety of the system.

Objectives:

  • efficient integration of the human into manufacturing processes considering his behavior
  • enhanced reliability within safe human-robot interaction and collaboration (hri / hrc)
  • application of concepts for safe online-adaption within technical systems
  • verifiability of safety in such scenarios

Partners:

Sponsorship:

Bavarian Research Foundation


Publications:

  • Stengel, D., Düpjohann, W., Ostermann, B.: Sicher und effizient - Wie lässt sich eine gleichermaßen sichere und effiziente Zusammenarbeit von Mensch und Roboter realisieren? In: Computer & AUTOMATION, 2013
  • Stengel, D., Vogel-Heuser, B.: Detection of dynamical safety zones by using 
    RGB-D sensors
    . In: 43rd International Symposium on Robotics (ISR 2012). 
    Taipei, Taiwan (2012)
  • Stengel, D., Wiedemann, T. Vogel-Heuser, B.: Efficient 3D Voxel Reconstruction of Human Shape within Robotic Work Cells. In: 2012 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA 2012), Chengdu, China (2012) 
    (Best Student Paper Award)
  • Stengel, D., Lange, C., Som, F., Vogel-Heuser, B.: Modellbasierte Geschwindigkeitssteuerung von industriellen Robotern zur sicheren Mensch-Roboter Kooperation. In: AUTOMATION 2012. Baden-Baden (2012)
  • Bortot, D., Bengler, K., Stengel, D., Vogel-Heuser, B.: Ergonomische Grunduntersuchungen zur Realisierung effizienter Mensch-Roboter-Kooperationen
    In: TTZ 2011 - 25. Fachtagung Technische Zuverlässigkeit, pp. 75–86. Leonberg (2011)
  • Stengel, D., Ostermann, B., Ding, H., Bortot, D., Schiller, F., Stursberg, O., 
    Bengler, K., Huelke, M., Som, F., Strunz, U.: 
    An Approach for Safe and Efficient Human-Robot Collaboration. In: 6th International Conference Safety of Industrial Automated Systems, ISBN 978-952-5183-40-5, Tampere, Finnland (2010)
  • Bortot, D., Ding, H., Günzkofer, F., Stengel, D., Bengler, K., Schiller, F., Stursberg, O.: Effizienzsteigerung durch die Bewegungsanalyse und -modellierung der Mensch-Roboter-Kooperation. In: Zeitschrift für Arbeitswissenschaft, S. 65–75 (2010)