Virtual Fencing for Safer Cobots

Collaborative robots (cobots) increasingly operate alongside humans, demanding robust real-time safeguarding. Current safety standards (e.g., ISO 10218, ANSI/RIA 15.06, ISO/TS 15066) require risk assessments but offer limited guidance for real-time responses. We propose a virtual fencing approach that detects and predicts human motion, ensuring safe cobot operation. Safety and performance trade-offs are modeled as an optimization problem and solved via sequential quadratic programming. Experimental validation shows that our method minimizes operational pauses while maintaining safety, providing a modular solution for human-robot collaboration.