In today's industrial production men and robots usually work separately from one another to avoid accidents. If it would be possible to overcome this separation, accuracy and speed of robots could be combined with the flexibility and reliability of human workers. One of the main problems in man-robot-cooperation is to avoid collisions between robot and man. For this purpose, a system based on digital image analysis has been developed at Fraunhofer IPK which supervises the working area. Up to three cameras track the objects and determine the three-dimensional coordinates of man and robot. With this information the robot is able to react flexibly to the movements of the worker. Therefore, it is no longer necessary to partition the working area of robots from those of men. Instead, workers are now allowed to operate in the same working.
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