NESTA

The NESTA project addresses the challenge of ensuring safe and efficient collaboration between humans and robots in smart manufacturing and agriculture, where flexibility and adaptability are key for productivity and worker protection. Current safety modules for collabora-tive robots rely on local computing, limiting their scalability and adaptability. By leveraging 6G-enabled edge/cloud in-frastructures, NESTA introduces an adaptive safety system capable of dynamically adjusting robot behaviour based on real-time network conditions and human proximity. The project will integrate a vision-based monitoring system (3D cameras and skeleton tracking) with a latency-aware safety module that dynamically enforces speed and separation limits according to ISO/TS 15066 standards. Through de-ployment on the UWS testbed (Aston University), NESTA will validate the feasibility of cloud-based safety orchestra-tion, where robot operations adapt in real time to both human presence and network performance.