Development of a Human-Robot Interface for a Safe and Intuitive Telecontrol of Collaborative Robots in Industrial Applications

Teleoperated robots have been used to substitute the human presence in dangerous applications and environments. The present paper, on the contrary, describes a user interface aimed to intuitively support the operator controlling a collaborative robot in a shared workspace. Such a result is achieved by commanding the robot arm according to a reference frame integral with the user. This approach allows maintaining the same control strategy no matter the relative orientation of the operator with respect to the manipulator and reducing the mental effort required for the teleoperation. The research campaign has been carried out using a UR5 collaborative robot from Universal Robots controlled through a user-friendly interface and an off-the-shelf gaming joypad. A virtual environment, which replicates the experimental setup, has also been designed to act as a training platform for the user who intends to telecontrol a robot arm. In addition, to assure the safety of the operator sharing his workspace with the robot, possible malfunctions of the teleoperation have been properly analyzed and addressed.