Assistance and rehabilitation robotic platforms must have precise sensory systems for human–robot interaction. Therefore, human pose estimation is a current topic of research, especially for the safety of human–robot collaboration and the evaluation of human biomarkers. Within this field of research, the evaluation of the low-cost marker-less human pose estimators of OpenPose and Detectron 2 has received much attention for their diversity of applications, such as surveillance, sports, videogames, and assessment in human motor rehabilitation. This work aimed to evaluate and compare the angles in the elbow and shoulder joints estimated by OpenPose and Detectron 2 during four typical upper-limb rehabilitation exercises: elbow side flexion, elbow flexion, shoulder extension, and shoulder abduction. A setup of two Kinect 2 RGBD cameras was used to obtain the ground truth of the joint and skeleton estimations during the different exercises. Finally, we provided a numerical comparison (RMSE and MAE) among the angle measurements obtained with OpenPose, Detectron 2, and the ground truth. The results showed how OpenPose outperforms Detectron 2 in these types of applications.

Human Muscular Manipulability is a metric that measures the comfort of an specific pose and it can be used for a variety of applications related to healthcare. For this reason, we introduce KIMHu: a Kinematic, Imaging and electroMyography dataset for Human muscular manipulability index prediction. The dataset is comprised of images, depth maps, skeleton tracking data, electromyography recordings and 3 different Human Muscular Manipulability indexes of 20 participants performing different physical exercises with their arm. The methodology followed to acquire and process the data is also presented for future replication. A specific analysis framework for Human Muscular Manipulability is proposed in order to provide benchmarking tools based on this dataset.

The evaluation of planners is essential to guarantee the efficiency and performance of trajectories executed by collaborative robots in human–robot interaction (HRI) contexts. The main objective of this research is to develop a method that allows obtaining an automated assessment of the performance of planners widely used in robotic environments. In addition to analyzing specific metrics such as planning time, path length, smoothness, and clearance, this paper introduces novel contributions, including a unique method for dynamic scene evaluation and a new comprehensive and global performance index, named Total Performance Index (TPIx), which encompasses all the aforementioned metrics. The system proposed is composed of a collaborative robot and an RGB-D sensor to monitor the environment using 3D data to perform safe trajectories during multiple tasks. In this quantitative evaluation, two single-query planners (RRT, KPIECE) and two multiple-query planners (SPARS, PRM) were analyzed. The results obtained demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method to automatically evaluate the planners used by collaborative robots. Therefore, this study contributes to the advancement of collaborative robotics by introducing updated methods for planner evaluation and aims to facilitate the development of more efficient and adaptive systems in light of recent advancements in robotic technologies.