The new industrial settings are characterized by the presence of human and robots that work in close proximity, cooperating in performing the required job. Such a collaboration, however, requires to pay attention to many aspects. Firstly, it is crucial to enable a communication between this two actors that is natural and efficient. Secondly, the robot behavior must always be compliant with the safety regulations, ensuring always a safe collaboration. In this paper, we propose a framework that enables multi-channel communication between humans and robots by leveraging multimodal fusion of voice and gesture commands while always respecting safety regulations. The framework is validated through a comparative experiment, demonstrating that, thanks to multimodal communication, the robot can extract valuable information for performing the required task and additionally, with the safety layer, the robot can scale its speed to ensure the operator's safety.

翻译：新型工业环境的特点是人与机器人在近距离内共同工作，协同完成所需任务。然而，这种协作需关注诸多方面。首先，必须实现这两个参与者之间自然且高效的通信。其次，机器人行为必须始终符合安全规范，确保协作过程的安全性。本文提出一个框架，通过融合语音与手势命令的多模态交互，在始终遵守安全规范的前提下实现人机多通道通信。该框架通过对比实验得到验证，结果表明：借助多模态通信，机器人能够提取执行任务所需的关键信息；同时，在安全层的保障下，机器人可调节自身速度以确保操作员的安全。