Abstract

Collaborative robots are expected to be an integral part of driving the fourth industrial revolution that is soon expected to happen. In human-robot collaboration, the robot and a human share a common workspace and work on a common task. Here the safety of a human working with the robot is of utmost importance. A collaborative robot usually consists of various sensors to ensure the safety of a human working with the robot. This research mainly focuses on establishing a safe environment for a human working alongside a robot by mounting an FMCW radar as an extrinsic sensor, through which the workspace of the robot is monitored. A customized tracking algorithm is developed for the sensor used in this study by including a dynamically varying gating threshold, and information about consecutive missed detections to track and localize the human around the workspace of the robot. The performance of the proposed system in successfully establishing a safe human-robot collaboration is examined across a few scenarios that arise when a single human operator is working alongside a robot, with the radar operating in different modes. An OptiTrack Motion Capture System is used as ground truth to validate the efficacy of the proposed system.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Human-robot interaction--Safety measures; Robots, Industrial--Safety measures; Proximity detectors; Radar

Publication Date

6-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Electrical Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Electrical Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Ferat Sahin

Advisor/Committee Member

Gill Tsouri

Advisor/Committee Member

Jamison Heard

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

EEEE-MS

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