The central goal of the AutARK research project was the development of an autonomous assistance system to support human-robot collaboration in assembly processes. To enable safe collaboration between humans and conventional industrial robots, a speed and distance monitoring system was developed as a safety function in the project. Here, the distance between human and robot is continuously calculated and the speed of the robot is adjusted accordingly. The closer the human comes to the robot, the slower the robot works. For this purpose, a novel near-body sensor system, in which ultra-wideband (UWB) based localization technologies were combined with fiber-optic shape sensors, is used to obtain data on the position, posture and motion of the human, thus generating a digital human model. In addition to safe human-robot collaboration, this data is used for activity recognition and process analysis using artificial intelligence methods. The potential of these developments and of human-robot collaboration in general was illustrated and examined at a demonstration workstation for transformer assembly.

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