Novel safety concept for safeguarding and supporting humans in human-robot shared workplaces with high-payload robots in industrial applications

This contribution aims on presenting a novel safety concept that provides a safe but also interactive and supportive work of humans cooperating with high-payload robots in industrial applications. The proposed safety concept consists of a tactile floor mat for ensuring the safety of humans and a visualization system for depicting user-relevant information by directly projecting it onto the shared workspace. Furthermore, we implemented the approach formula described in ISO/TS 15066 to allow a dynamic generation of minimal safety zones enclosing the robot that depend not only on the robot's joint angles and velocities but also on the human's behavior. In this case, the human's direction of movement and speed was estimated using data from the tactile floor mat sensor.