Virtual reality assisted robot programming for human collaboration

Programming of an industrial robotic arm is demonstrated in this work, so as to adapt the robot's prescribed movements in order to guarantee safety of the human with whom the robot shares its workspace. The robot must either stop or change trajectory or slow down when it detects a human in its course. The approach is applicable not at robot operating system level but at robot programming level. This is particularly interesting for robots of the previous generation that have not been designed to collaborate with human workforce. A tracking sensor and the robot encoders feed data of the human and robot in real time to the respective digital twin model constructed in an open virtual reality development platform, whereas elementary calculations to determine the required program variant are performed within the virtual environment and a signal is sent to the robot. Communication between the physical and virtual environment are effected via a micro-controller. A simple pick-and-place program in V+ language is used as a demonstrator. The robot program has been parametrically programmed to anticipate such signals and take appropriate action using the corresponding interrupt-type subroutines. Preliminary results proved feasibility of this concept and potential for full scale development and deployment automation. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.