A phySiCal Emulator foR safeTy vAlidation and training of human-robot InteractioN (ASCERTAIN)

ASCERTAIN aims to develop a physical emulator to enable human-robot collaboration emulations in a risk-controlled environment.

Background

A phySiCal Emulator foR safeTy vAlidation and training of human-robot InteractioN (ASCERTAIN)

Nowadays, robots are getting closer to people and human operators expect to be able to co-manipulate or tele-manipulate objects together with collaborative robots (cobots). However, although the safety of cobots regarding collision, impact or crush has been extensively discussed and addressed in academia and industry, safety issues of human-robot collaborative systems, especially those in which human operators are physically coupled with their cobot partners through tools or objects, have rarely been addressed, which is the main reason that such human-robot collaborative systems have not been employed widely in industries. Safety validation experiments of human-robot collaboration might be risky to conduct, e.g., the forces received by human operators and applied by the cobots could be detrimental, the heavy object to be co-manipulated could fall down to hurt the human operator if an emergent or dangerous incident happens. ASCERTAIN aims to develop a physical emulator to enable human-robot collaboration emulations in a risk-controlled environment.

Purpose/Vision

ASCERTAIN aims to build up a risk-controlled platform to emulate human-robot collaboration and tele-manipulation tasks for safety validation and training purposes, which will pave the way for the development and deployment of the real counterparts of the physical emulator in various industries. The goal of the project is to utilize and combine cobot technology, eXtended Reality (XR) and haptics technology to create artificial and virtual environments and emulate human-robot interaction tasks to have the human operator feel as if he/she was co-manipulating or tele-manipulating objects with a virtual cobot, e.g., human-robot co-lifting. One human-robot collaboration demonstrator and one human-robot teleoperation demonstrator will be developed to show the effectiveness of the physical emulator in the end of the project.

The project aims to collaborate with SME companies including:

2-3 XR software companies, e.g., Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) developers and integrators in industrial training, maintenance and inspection, healthcare, entertainment and education areas to provide insights about the potential applications of the physical emulator.
2-3 robot companies, e.g., cobot manufacturers, technology providers with use of cobots, system integrator, end users of cobots to provide practical use cases for the two demonstrators.

Expected Results

The outcome of the project will be a demonstration at TRL4 (technology validated in lab) which will serve as a proof-of-concept for application(s) for national or international funds, e.g., IFD grants. A collaboration for such larger project proposal(s) can be expected by the partners in 2021. The technology will require further investigation and increase of TRL. It is expected that it will take at least 4 years to achieve commercialization of services with the developed technology. This will be done via technology transfer from academia and GTS to private companies and the sharing of knowledge will be open to the general public and wider stakeholders.