Enhancing Human-Robot Collaboration: A Sim2Real Domain Adaptation Algorithm for Point Cloud Segmentation in Industrial Environments

The robust interpretation of 3D environments is crucial for human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications, where safety and operational efficiency are paramount. Semantic segmentation plays a key role in this context by enabling a precise and detailed understanding of the environment. Considering the intense data hunger for real-world industrial annotated data essential for effective semantic segmentation, this paper introduces a pioneering approach in the Sim2Real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation of 3D point cloud data, specifically tailored for HRC. Our focus is on developing a network that robustly transitions from simulated environments to real-world applications, thereby enhancing its practical utility and impact on a safe HRC. In this work, we propose a dual-stream network architecture (FUSION) combining Dynamic Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (DGCNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) augmented with residual layers as a Sim2Real domain adaptation algorithm for an industrial environment. The proposed model was evaluated on real-world HRC setups and simulation industrial point clouds, it showed increased state-of-the-art performance, achieving a segmentation accuracy of 97.76%, and superior robustness compared to existing methods.

COVERED, CollabOratiVE Robot Environment Dataset for 3D Semantic segmentation

Safe human-robot collaboration (HRC) has recently gained a lot of interest with the emerging Industry 5.0 paradigm. Conventional robots are being replaced with more intelligent and flexible collaborative robots (cobots). Safe and efficient collaboration between cobots and humans largely relies on the cobot's comprehensive semantic understanding of the dynamic surrounding of industrial environments. Despite the importance of semantic understanding for such applications, 3D semantic segmentation of collaborative robot workspaces lacks sufficient research and dedicated datasets. The performance limitation caused by insufficient datasets is called 'data hunger' problem. To overcome this current limitation, this work develops a new dataset specifically designed for this use case, named "COVERED", which includes point-wise annotated point clouds of a robotic cell. Lastly, we also provide a benchmark of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithm performance on the dataset and demonstrate a real-time semantic segmentation of a collaborative robot workspace using a multi-LiDAR system. The promising results from using the trained Deep Networks on a real-time dynamically changing situation shows that we are on the right track. Our perception pipeline achieves 20Hz throughput with a prediction point accuracy of $>$96\% and $>$92\% mean intersection over union (mIOU) while maintaining an 8Hz throughput.

Improving safety in physical human-robot collaboration via deep metric learning

Direct physical interaction with robots is becoming increasingly important in flexible production scenarios, but robots without protective fences also pose a greater risk to the operator. In order to keep the risk potential low, relatively simple measures are prescribed for operation, such as stopping the robot if there is physical contact or if a safety distance is violated. Although human injuries can be largely avoided in this way, all such solutions have in common that real cooperation between humans and robots is hardly possible and therefore the advantages of working with such systems cannot develop its full potential. In human-robot collaboration scenarios, more sophisticated solutions are required that make it possible to adapt the robot's behavior to the operator and/or the current situation. Most importantly, during free robot movement, physical contact must be allowed for meaningful interaction and not recognized as a collision. However, here lies a key challenge for future systems: detecting human contact by using robot proprioception and machine learning algorithms. This work uses the Deep Metric Learning (DML) approach to distinguish between non-contact robot movement, intentional contact aimed at physical human-robot interaction, and collision situations. The achieved results are promising and show show that DML achieves 98.6\% accuracy, which is 4\% higher than the existing standards (i.e. a deep learning network trained without DML). It also indicates a promising generalization capability for easy portability to other robots (target robots) by detecting contact (distinguishing between contactless and intentional or accidental contact) without having to retrain the model with target robot data.