  The current capabilities of robotic systems make human collaboration
necessary to accomplish complex tasks effectively. In this work, we are
introducing a framework to ensure safety in a human-robot collaborative
environment. The system is composed of a wearable 2-DOF robot, a low-cost and
easy-to-install tracking system, and a collision avoidance algorithm based on
the Artificial Potential Field (APF). The wearable robot is designed to hold a
fiducial marker and maintain its visibility to the tracking system, which, in
turn, localizes the user's hand with good accuracy and low latency and provides
haptic feedback to the user. The system is designed to enhance the performance
of collaborative tasks while ensuring user safety. Three experiments were
carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The first one
evaluated the accuracy of the tracking system. The second experiment analyzed
human-robot behavior during an imminent collision. The third experiment
evaluated the system in a collaborative activity in a shared working
environment. The results show that the implementation of the introduced system
reduces the operation time by 16% and increases the average distance between
the user's hand and the robot by 5 cm.

Robotics;Human-Computer Interaction