Modern industry still relies on manual manufacturing operations and safe human-robot interaction is of great interest nowadays. Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) allows close and efficient collaborative scenarios by maintaining a protective separation distance during robot operation. The paper focuses on a novel approach to strengthen the SSM safety requirements by introducing haptic feedback to a robotic cell worker. Tactile stimuli provide early warning of dangerous movements and proximity to the robot, based on the human reaction time and instantaneous velocities of robot and operator. A preliminary experiment was performed to identify the reaction time of participants when they are exposed to tactile stimuli in a collaborative environment with controlled conditions. In a second experiment, we evaluated our approach into a study case where human worker and cobot performed collaborative planetary gear assembly. Results show that the applied approach increased the average minimum distance between the robot's end-effector and hand by 44% compared to the operator relying only on the visual feedback. Moreover, the participants without the haptic support have failed several times to maintain the protective separation distance.

翻译：现代工业仍然依赖手工制造作业和安全的人类机器人互动,这在当今引起了极大的兴趣。 速度和分离监测(SSM)通过在机器人操作期间保持保护性分离距离,允许采取密切而高效的协作情景。 本文侧重于一种新颖的方法,通过向机器人细胞工人提供随机反馈,加强SSM安全要求。 触摸刺激根据人类反应时间和机器人和操作员的瞬时速度,对危险移动和接近机器人提供预警。 进行了初步实验,以确定参与者在受控制条件下的协作环境中接触触摸性刺激时的反应时间。 在第二次实验中,我们评估了我们的方法,在人类工人和合用行星齿轮组装的案例中,使用的方法使机器人的终端效应和手掌之间的平均最小距离提高了44%,而操作者仅依靠视觉反馈。 此外,没有机械支持的参与者多次未能保持保护性分离距离。