A Safety Response Mechanism for an Autonomous Moving Robot in a Small Manufacturing Environment using Q-learning Algorithm and Speech Recognition

Abstract The industrial manufacturing sector is currently undergoing a tremendous revolution moving from traditional production processes to intelligent techniques. Under this revolution, known as Industry 4.0 (I40), a robot is no longer a static equipment but an active workforce to the factory production alongside human operators. Safety becomes crucial for humans and robots to ensure a smooth production run in such environments. Operators are subject to frequent safety inductions to react in emergencies but very little is done for robots. Our research proposes a safety response mechanism for a small manufacturing plant, through which an autonomous robot learns the obstacle-free trajectory to the closest safety exit in emergencies. We implement a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, Q-learning, to enable the path learning abilities of the robot. After obtaining the robot optimal path selection options with Q-learning, we code the outcome as a rule-based system for the safety response. We also program a speech recognition system for operators to react timeously, with a voice command, to an emergency that requires stopping all plant activities even when they are far away from emergency stops (ESTOPs) button. The factory emergency signal can be given by an ESTOP or a voice command sent directly to the factory central controller: an S7-1200 Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC) in this experiment. We simulate a simple and small manufacturing environment overview to test our safety procedure. Our results show that the safety response mechanism successfully generates paths without obstacles to the closest safety exits from all the factory locations.