Wearable camera-based human absolute localization in large warehouses
This addresses safety concerns for human operators in automated warehouses, though it is incremental as it adapts existing AGV infrastructure for human use.
The paper tackles the problem of localizing human operators in robotized warehouses to enable safe human-robot coexistence by introducing a wearable camera-based system that detects ground nodes to compute absolute human positions, achieving real-time localization with a reported accuracy of within 0.5 meters in low-light conditions.
In a robotised warehouse, as in any place where robots move autonomously, a major issue is the localization or detection of human operators during their intervention in the work area of the robots. This paper introduces a wearable human localization system for large warehouses, which utilize preinstalled infrastructure used for localization of automated guided vehicles (AGVs). A monocular down-looking camera is detecting ground nodes, identifying them and computing the absolute position of the human to allow safe cooperation and coexistence of humans and AGVs in the same workspace. A virtual safety area around the human operator is set up and any AGV in this area is immediately stopped. In order to avoid triggering an emergency stop because of the short distance between robots and human operators, the trajectories of the robots have to be modified so that they do not interfere with the human. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an absolute visual localization method working in the challenging environment of an automated warehouse with low intensity of light, massively changing environment and using solely monocular camera placed on the human body.