Visual servoing path tracking for safe human-robot interaction

When a human is introduced into a robotic cell, the robot controller must be aware of the human location in order to assure her/his physical integrity. This paper presents a pre-collision strategy which maintains a safety distance between a robot and a human who wears a tracking system composed of a motion capture suit and a UWB localization system. The system proposed is able to guide the robot using visual servoing through a previously defined path. The time-independent behaviour of this system enables the robot to completely track the desired trajectory, even in those cases when the robot goes away from the human during the tracking to guarantee her/his safety. This work was supported in part by the Spanish MEC under Project DPI2005-06222 and Grant AP2005-1458 and by the Valencian Community under Grant BPI06/015.