IoT-Enabled Robot Skin System for Enhancement of Safe Human-Robot Interaction

Collaborative robots along with skilled manpower offer flexible and intelligent services by combining the cognitive power of humans with robot's flexibility in small-batch production. To realize this, collaborative robots are required to collaborate with humans in close range sharing the same workspace. In such a case, ensuring safe Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is a big challenge. Safety solutions are expected to be smart enough to monitor the robot environment, analyse the collected data, and alert the user in case of any anomalies for timely intervention. This work, therefore, proposes an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled smart robot skin system as a safety solution to enhance safety in the collaborative environment. It is flexible and modular, based on self-capacitive technology for proximity-touch sensing. Leveraging the IoT technology, wireless communication within the skin system and remote programming of the skin network were implemented. More so, real-time data monitoring, analysis, and visualization are implemented leveraging the flexible ThingSpeak cloud service data processing capabilities. Based on the processed data, cloud-based event handling, which updates the user of the robot skin performance, was also implemented. This approach will enable remote maintenance, and enhance the safety function of the skin system for effective HRC.