A Concept for a HRC Workspace Using Proximity Sensors

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) poses new challenges for robotic perception systems. This paper proposes a concept for HRC workspace augmented with capacitive proximity sensors and present methods for camera-less multi-human/multi-object detection, localization, and tracking based on proximity feedback. A gamified HRC experiment realizing shell-game is designed for evaluation purposes. Experimental results performed in the presented HRC setup verify that the proposed methods are able to detect, localize, and track objects using only the Capacitive Proximity Sensors (CPS) feedback.