Augmented reality for safety zones in human-robot collaboration

Worker productivity in manufacturing could be increased by reducing the distance between robots and humans in human-robot collaboration (HRC). However, physical cages generally limit this interaction. We use Augmented Reality (AR) to visualise virtual safety zones on a real robot arm, thereby replacing the physical cages and bringing humans and robots closer together. We demonstrate this with a collaborative pick and place application that makes use of a Universal Robots 10 (UR10) robot arm and a Microsoft HoloLens 2 for control and visualisation. This mimics a real task in an industrial robot cell. The virtual safety zone sizes are based on ISO standards for HRC. However, we are the first to also consider hardware and network latencies in the calculations of the virtual safety zone sizes.