Environment-aware proximity detection with capacitive sensors for human-robot-interaction

Recently, the need for safe human-robot-interaction has become increasingly important, and with it the requirement to reliably detect persons in the workspace of a robot. Capacitive sensors mounted to the robot structure can be used to measure the presence of conductive objects and, hence, allow the detection of persons. However, various objects in the workspace can influence capacitive sensor measurements. Thus, we propose to record an environment model containing the expected sensor values for relevant robot poses. Using this model, distance estimation and real-time reaction can be performed even in the presence of additional conductive objects in the workspace. A demonstration of our approach was shown at the Hannover Messe 2015.