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Cell production systems meet the diversified production and quantity requirements flexibly. However, their efficiency mainly depends on the human operators' working performance. In order to improve the efficiency of the cell production system, effective assembly-support systems should be developed to assist human operators during the assembly process. In this paper, a multi-modal assembly-support system (MASS) is proposed, which aims to support assembly human operators from both information aspect and physical aspect while meets the actual manufacturing requirements. With the information and physical support from this system, the assembly complexity and burden to the assembly operators are reduced. To evaluate the effect of MASS, a group of human operators are required to execute a cable-insert task. From the experimental results, we can conclude that using this system, the human operators' assembly performance is improved and their mental work load is reduced, which improves the efficiency of the cell production system.

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In industrialized countries, high wages, a declining number of skilled workers, and other issues, have led to a need for the establishment of new highefficiency and high-reliability production systems capable of maintaining high international competitiveness. This particular issue could be addressed with a form of human-robot cooperative production (in which the robot provides supplementary support so that the human operator can devote him- or herself to highly difficult, high-value-added work), which requires the establishment of technologies for ensuring human safety. In this research, the authors propose the application of functional safety that is realized by combining position, speed, and force monitoring, and the authors have realized cooperation between a human operator and an inherently high-speed, highpower robot, as well as cooperative work implemented by a human operator while touching an automatically operated robot.

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