Operator Monitoring System for Cell Production
Feng Duan, Jeffrey Too Chuan Tan, Ryu Kato, Tamio Arai · Advanced Robotics · 2009
Since a human operator enables a cell production system to flexibly meet the diversified production and quantity requirements, monitoring and optimizing the operator's assembly motion can improve the assembly efficiency. This paper describes an operator monitoring system to monitor an operator's assembly motion in real-time. To overcome the changing light conditions in actual factories, a special color filter method was used to detect the color marks attached to the operator's body. To determine whether the detected data are correct, a kinematic human body simulator was built to regenerate an operator's motions in real-time. According to the experimental results, the operator monitoring system meets the measurement accuracy requirement. Furthermore, this system can easily be adjusted to satisfy the changing light conditions. When the operator executes the assembly task using a bad motion, based on the assembly motion model database, our monitoring system can provide information to guide the operator and optimize his/her assembly motion. Furthermore, this system can also recognize the operator's states. Due to the characteristics of this method, it can be used to conveniently optimize the operator's assembly process in the actual manufacturing fields.