Ensuring Human Safety with Offline Simulation and Real-time Workspace Surveillance to Develope a Hybrid Robot Assistance System for Welding of Assemblies

The paper discusses the development of a multi-robot assistance system to reduce labour-intensive manual handling of heavy parts in welding processes. It focuses on a safe and ergonomic collaboration between humans and robots with overlapping workspaces and discusses technical means to ensure work safety. The described safety concept consists of two parts: The design of the robot cell and the path planning is performed by an offline programming system which contains a digital human model (DHM). The second step is a real-time, camera-based workspace monitoring realised and tested together with the industry partners within a demonstrator. The research is part of the project "rorarob" [1],[2],[3] and is supported by a demonstrator at TU Dortmund University.