Modelling of Ultrawideband Propagation Scenarios for Safe Human-Robot Interaction in Warehouse Environment

The paper presents an idealized warehouse environment where human and robots are both present and need to communicate to avoid mutual collisions. The warehouse shelves are modelled as metallic (PEC) parallelepipeds, which is the largest obstacle of practical interest, while for communication an UWB Gaussian signal at 3.994 GHz and 468 MHz width is used. The signal propagation is analyzed using ray tracing software, with the goal to determine the range of communication and the optimum antenna configurations. Several scenarios have been analyzed and discussed. It is found that the major influence on the communication range is exhibited by type of polarization of antennas placed on human and robot, while the optimum range is obtained when all the antennas are vertically polarized.