A Virtual Fencing Framework for Safe and Efficient Collaborative Robotics

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 tradeoffs 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.