SZENARIS Leads EMPOWER – A Project to Improve Occupational Safety in Human-Robot Collaboration

SZENARIS and the Bremen Institute for Production and Logistics GmbH (BIBA) are involved in the project “EMPOWER – XR-based Digital Assistant Enabling Skills Empowerment for Human-Robot Co-Working in Safety-Critical Industrial Applications”, which explores the use of Virtual Reality (VR) to enhance occupational safety and ergonomics in human-robot collaboration at industrial production workplaces.

EMPOWER is being funded as part of the 1st Open Call of the MASTER-XR EU project. The consortium comprises seven partners from Greece, Spain, and Germany, aiming to enable training and education for working with and alongside robots through XR (Extended Reality). To achieve this, MASTER-XR offers an open platform that serves as the foundation for developing and delivering XR-based solutions for industrial applications. Within this framework, EMPOWER promotes an innovative training approach in the form of a VR-based application, focused on safety and ergonomics in safety-critical industrial environments, for example in human-robot collaboration (HRC) during assembly processes. The development is exemplified by the use case of transformer assembly.

The results of EMPOWER are intended for the training of personnel in industrial environments to support and enhance the learning experience in terms of safety and ergonomics in human-robot interaction applications.

The planned modular VR tool consists of various sub-modules designed for real-time visualization, a digital assistant, an HRC knowledge base, data acquisition, and safety and ergonomics assessment. The modular structure of the tool enables it to be adapted to comparable safety-critical industrial scenarios.