Simulation Based Human-Robot Co-working

In the last years a lot of robot builder companies launched their collaborative robots, enabling the human-robot interaction in the same workspace. The main issue by the workspace sharing and/or co-working between the human actors and the industrial robots is the safety of the operators. For that reason the co-working speed is limited to 250mm/s, which is far less than a cage surrounded, robot cell production speed. Using the collaborative features of the mentioned robots, the robot program teaching methods are special ones, which can't be applied for "usual" industrial robots. The purpose of this study is to present the possibility of collaboration between robot and humans using a Kinect sensor and Unity 3D software platform. The main idea is the digitization of the human movements, collision analysis in a virtual environment and control of the real robot so that the collision does not occur in reality. This will give the possibility to stop in time the robot, or even to generate collision free path for the ongoing robot task. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.