🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the limitations of conventional human-robot collaboration systems, which are constrained by tethered connections, lack modularity and rapid reconfigurability, and fail to meet real-time perception and safety requirements with existing commercial wireless solutions. The authors propose an infrastructure-free, 5G-enabled wireless reconfigurable collaborative unit architecture integrating a battery-powered multi-sensor platform and an edge vision module, enabling cross-scenario deployment. By training a highly robust hand and grasp pose estimation model using a fusion of synthetic and real-world data, and leveraging 5G edge computing to optimize the bandwidth–latency trade-off, the system achieves a round-trip latency of 12 ms across multiple international 5G networks, a mean average precision (mAP@50–95) of 97.74% ± 0.10% for pose detection, and an average inference time of 12.5 ms, thereby demonstrating the feasibility of safe and adaptive human-robot collaboration.
📝 Abstract
Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) plays a vital role in dynamic, high mix, low volume industrial scenarios such as remanufacturing, which frequently face workcell rearrangements. Traditional setups are constrained by power and data cabling, restricting modularity and reconfigurations, while the selection of commercial wireless devices suitable for real-time perception and safe collaboration are limited in availability. This paper presents a highly flexible, wireless, 5G-based system that serves as a versatile experimental testbed for applications including remanufacturing, operator training, and user studies. To eliminate infrastructure barriers, the workcell integrates a novel battery-powered, multi-sensor platform prototype. Additionally, to support operator safety and system adaptability across environmental shifts, the system integrates a computer vision module for object detection and pose estimation, further augmented for robust hand recognition. Trained on synthetic and real data, the model reliably detects oriented grasping poses and human hands across varying lighting and background conditions (with an mAP@50-95 of 97.74 +- 0.10% and a mean inference time of 12.5 ms). Offloading these computationally intensive tasks to the edge via 5G, the proposed architecture contributes to resolving the bandwidth-latency trade-off. To demonstrate portability, the system was implemented in both Hungary and Norway, and was evaluated across a combination of public and private, Standalone and Non-Standalone 5G infrastructures. The performed network experiments produced results in round-trip response times down to 12 ms in case of compatible network-device pairings, suitable for safe, adaptive HRC. However, these measurements also revealed practical limitations related to interoperability in current 5G deployments that should be addressed in future works.