Creating an Active Awareness System for Humans in Robotic Workcell.docVIP

Acta Polytechnica Hungarica Vol. 5, No. 2, 2008 Creating an Active Awareness System for Humans in Robotic Workcell Olesya Ogorodnikova Department of Mechatronics, Optics and Technological Information, Budapest University of Technology and Economics M?egyetem rkp. 3-9, H-1111 Budapest, Hungary E-mail: olessia@git.bme.hu Abstract: This article is devoted to the problem of human’s security and safety at the time of any interaction with robots. We already discussed robot system reliability in the previous paper [1], now we emphasize the role of attention and human awareness with respect to the robot’s performance in vicinity. We analyzed human’s cognitive and physical abilities in ambient environment perception with the aim at effective warning system implementation. We introduced warning system interface on the basis of vibrotactile cuing, proposed an algorithm for robot controller and interface that impart tactile and visual information to human basing on data acquired from external sensory unit. Keywords: Human-Robot Interaction,awareness, vibrotactile stimuli 1 Introduction More than 40 years have passed, since robots have been introduced for industrial applications. Robotics technology, which has been matured enough to be applied to several systems in our daily life, is expected to be one of the key technologies for the aging society. In industrial applications, robots usually isolated from human to ensure his/her safety, however, some advanced tasks, where robots cannot perform alone without superior human’s capabilities, there is a necessity in the work spaces intersection, where conventional safeguarded systems are not sufficient anymore. According to safety standards robot must be fully isolated from the other machines and any interactions with human are allowed only if the robot power is cut off, and the performance is interrupted, what usually brings to losses in productivity