Paper ID: 2410.23377 • Published Oct 30, 2024
A Cost-Effective Thermal Imaging Safety Sensor for Industry 5.0 and Collaborative Robotics
Daniel Barros, Paula Fraga-Lamas, Tiago M. Fernandez-Carames, Sergio Ivan Lopes
TL;DR
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The Industry 5.0 paradigm focuses on industrial operator well-being and
sustainable manufacturing practices, where humans play a central role, not only
during the repetitive and collaborative tasks of the manufacturing process, but
also in the management of the factory floor assets. Human factors, such as
ergonomics, safety, and well-being, push the human-centric smart factory to
efficiently adopt novel technologies while minimizing environmental and social
impact. As operations at the factory floor increasingly rely on collaborative
robots (CoBots) and flexible manufacturing systems, there is a growing demand
for redundant safety mechanisms (i.e., automatic human detection in the
proximity of machinery that is under operation). Fostering enhanced process
safety for human proximity detection allows for the protection against possible
incidents or accidents with the deployed industrial devices and machinery. This
paper introduces the design and implementation of a cost-effective thermal
imaging Safety Sensor that can be used in the scope of Industry 5.0 to trigger
distinct safe mode states in manufacturing processes that rely on collaborative
robotics. The proposed Safety Sensor uses a hybrid detection approach and has
been evaluated under controlled environmental conditions. The obtained results
show a 97% accuracy at low computational cost when using the developed hybrid
method to detect the presence of humans in thermal images.