Supplementary Material To: A Unified Perception Benchmark for Capacitive Proximity Sensing Towards Safe Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC)

Supplementary Material To: A  Unified  Perception  Benchmark  for  Capacitive  Proximity  Sensing Towards  Safe  Human-Robot  Collaboration  (HRC)

-- Accepted for presentation at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021 Xi'an, China

-- Final formal acceptance pending

-- Conference proceedings pending

Paper Abstract:

During the co-presence of human workers and robots, measures are required to avoid injuries from undesired contacts. Capacitive Proximity Sensors (CPSs) offer a costeffective solution to cover the entire robot manipulator with fast close-range perception for HRC tasks, closing the perception gap between tactile detection and mid-range perception. CPSs do not suffer from occlusion and compared to pure tactile or force sensing, they react earlier and allow increasing the operating speed of Collaborative Robots (Cobots) while still maintaining safety. However, since capacitive coupling to obstacles varies with their distance, shape and material properties, the projection from capacitance to actual distances is a general problem. In this work, we propose an universal benchmark test procedure for fellow researchers to evaluate their CPSs. Considering ISO/TS 15066 for Power and Force Limiting (PFL) as a reference, we derive the requirements for the specified body regions and propose a method for determining the operation speed to comply with PFL based on a pre-defined detection threshold. Finally, the benchmark test procedure is evaluated on three different concepts of CPSs from the contributed researchers, demonstrating the general applicability.

This paper has been accepted for potential presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings at IEEE ICRA 2021. Further supplementary material will be published upon final acceptance to ICRA 2021.

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 A pre-print version of the paper may be found here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350097869_A_Unified_Perception_...

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The link to the conference proceedings will be attached, as soon as the conference proceedings have been published

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For further information feel free to contact us at:

Serkan Ergun

Institute for Smart Systems Technologies - Sensors and Actuators Group

Klagenfurt Univeristy

Universitätsstrasse 65-67,

A- 9020 Klagenfurt

E- Mail:

serkan.ergun@aau.at