Virtual Reality for Safe Integration of Collaborative Robots

Abstract

Industry 4.0, the ongoing transformation of production systems and work organization through the integration of digital technologies, creates new health and safety challenges in the workplace. In particular, collaborative robotics offers increased flexibility in workstation design, permitting a robot and an operator to share a task or a workspace. However, this proximity with the robot exposes the operator to physical risks in a way that requires new means of prevention. In this context, digital technologies of Industry 4.0, such as simulation and Virtual Reality (VR) offers promising opportunities for early-stage, human-centered, rapid, iterative workstation design by involving operators in the design process of their future workstation when adaptations are still easy to implement. However, we have identified limitations of current robotic simulation tools with respect to integrating safety concerns or human-robot interaction, and of VR that has limited validity, i.e., ability to accurately reflect the activity of the operator in the real workstation. To further assess and address these limitations, a VR application was developed using ROS 2 and Unity. It enables the execution of the robot program within a virtual environment and in interaction with the workpieces and human operator, so that it can later be seamlessly deployed on the real robot. In this article, we present a proof of concept of how VR can be used in the collaborative robot integration process. A preliminary validation step and user feedback suggests differences between the real and virtual task with respect to execution time and mental load, but with good validity with regard to postures. An experimental protocol for more robust validation is proposed.

Keywords: Collaborative robotics, Virtual reality, Workstation design

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007281