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In the presented project, new approaches for the prevention of hand movements leading to hazards and for non-contact detection of fingers are intended to permit comprehensive and economical protection on circular saws. The basic principles may also be applied to other machines with manual loading and/or unloading. Two new detection principles are explained. The first is the distinction between skin and wood or other material by spectral analysis in the near infrared region. Using LED and photodiodes it is possible to detect fingers and hands reliable. With a kind of light curtain the intrusion into the dangerous zone near the blade can be prevented. The second principle is video image processing to detect persons, arms and fingers. In the first stage of development the detection of upper limb extremities within a defined hazard area by means of a computer based video image analysis is investigated.
The proper use of protective hoods on panel saws should reliably prevent severe injuries from (hand) contact with the blade or material kickbacks. It also should minimize long-term lung damages from fine-particle pollution. To achieve both purposes the hood must be adjusted properly by the operator for each workpiece to fit its height. After a work process is finished, the hood must be lowered down completely to the bench. Unfortunately, in practice the protective hood is fixed at a high position for most of the work time and herein loses its safety features. A system for an automatic height adjustment of the hood would increase comfort and safety. If the system can distinguish between workpieces and skin reliably, it furthermore will reduce occupational hazards for panel saw users. A functional demonstrator of such a system has been designed and implemented to show the feasibility of this approach. A specific optical sensor system is used to observe a point on the extended cut axis in front of the blade. The sensor determines the surface material reliably and measures the distance to the workpiece surface simultaneously. If the distance changes because of a workpiece fed to the machine, the control unit will set the motor-adjusted hood to the correct height. If the sensor detects skin, the hood will not be moved. In addition a camera observes the area under the hood. If there are no workpieces or offcuts left under the hood, it will be lowered back to the default position.
Entering the work envelope of an industrial robot can lead to severe injury from collisions with moving parts of the system. Conventional safety mechanisms therefore mostly restrict access to the robot using physical barriers such as walls and fences or non-contact protective devices including light curtains and laser scanners. As none of these mechanisms applies to human-robot-collaboration (HRC), a concept in which human and machine complement one another by working hand in hand, there is a rising need for safe and reliable detection of human body parts amidst background clutter. For this application camera-based systems are typically well suited. Still, safety concerns remain, owing to possible detection failures caused by environmental occlusion, extraneous light or other adverse imaging conditions. While ultrasonic proximity sensing can provide physical diversity to the system, it does not yet allow to reliably distinguish relevant objects from background objects.This work investigates a new approach to detecting relevant objects and human body parts based on acoustic holography. The approach is experimentally validated using a low-cost application-specific ultrasonic sensor system created from micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). The presented results show that this system far outperforms conventional proximity sensors in terms of lateral imaging resolution and thus allows for more intelligent muting processes without compromising the safety of people working close to the robot. Based upon this work, a next step could be the development of a multimodal sensor systems to safeguard workers who collaborate with robots using the described ultrasonic sensor system.
In this paper, we introduce an optical sensor system, which is integrated into an industrial push-button. The sensor allows to classify the type of material that is in contact with the button when pressed into different material categories on the basis of the material's so called "spectral signature". An approach for a safety sensor system at circular table saws on the same base has been introduced previously on SIAS-2007. This contactless working sensor is able to distinguish reliably between skin, textiles, leather and various other kinds of materials. A typical application for this intelligent push-button is the use at possibly dangerous machines, whose operating instructions include either the prohibition or the obligation to wear gloves during the work at the machine. An exemple of machines at which no gloves are allowed are pillar drilling machines, because of the risk of getting caught in the drill chuck and being turned in by the machine. In many cases this causes very serious hand injuries. Depending on the application needs, the sensor system integrated into the push-button can be configured flexibly by software to prevent the operator from accidentally starting a machine with or without gloves, which can decrease the risk of severe accidents significantly. Especially two-hand controls are incentive to manipulation for easier handling. By equipping both push-buttons of a two-hand control with material classification properties, the user is forced to operate the controls with his bare fingers. That limitation disallows the manipulation of a two-hand control by a simple rodding device.
Persons entering the working range of industrial robots are exposed to a high risk of collision with moving parts of the system, potentially causing severe injuries. Conventional systems, which restrict the access to this area, range from walls and fences to light barriers and other vision based protective devices (VBPD). None of these systems allow to distinguish between humans and workpieces in a safe and reliable manner. In this work, a new approach is investigated, which uses an active near-infrared (NIR) camera system with advanced capabilities of skin detection to distinguish humans from workpieces based on characteristic spectral signatures. This approach allows to implement more intelligent muting processes and at the same time increases the safety of persons working close to the robots. The conceptual integration of such a camera system into a VBPD and the enhancement of person detection methods through skin detection are described and evaluated in this paper. Based upon this work, next steps could be the development of multimodal sensor systems to safeguard working ranges of collaborating robots using the described camera system.
Microcontroller-based sensor systems offer great opportunities for the implementation of safety features for potentially dangerous machinery. However, in general they are difficult to assess with regard to their reliability and failure rate. This paper describes the safety assessment of hardware and software of a new and innovative sensor system. The hardware is assessed by standardized methods according to norm EN ISO 13849-1, while the use of model checking is presented as an approach to solve the problem of validating the software.
At previous SIAS conferences, we presented a novel opto-electronic safety sensor system for skin detection at circular saws jointly developed with the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance (IFA). This work now presents the development results of our consecutive research on a prototype of a sensor system for more general production machine applications including robot workplaces. The system uses offthe shelf LEDs and photodiodes in combination with dedicated optics and a microcontroller system to implement a so-called spectral light curtain.