Human-robot collaboration in cellular manufacturing: Design and development

Abstract

The challenge of this work is to study the design and development of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in cellular manufacturing. Based on the concept of human collaborative design, four main design factors are being identified and developed in an active HRC prototype production cell for cable harness assembly. Human collaborative design aims to optimize the system design for the advantage of collaboration between human and robots based on human considerations. Task modeling approach is developed to study and analyze the task in order to identify the collaboration tasks to develop the collaboration planning. In the collaboration safety development, five safety designs, cover both hardware and control design, are proposed and developed in the prototype system. Risk assessment is conducted to verify the safety design. Two main experiments were conducted as preliminary study to investigate mental workload in HRC. A multimodal information support system is developed in the study of man-machine interface in this work to provide a comprehensive human-robot interface to facilitate human operator. The system performance evaluation had proven the improvement of prototype production cell with HRC design for cellular manufacturing.

Collaborative manufacturing with physical human–robot interaction

“…These include: tool connection/disconnection (1,8), ball insertion (2, 3, 7), joint pivoting (4, 5), vision triggered emergency stop (6), and joint manual unmounting (9,10).…”

“…Papakostas et al [8] discuss the key features of cooperating robotic cells in automotive assembly, and provide simulated comparisons of two scenarios: a conventional welding robotic cell, and one with cooperating robots. The authors of [9] assess five alternative safety designs, covering both hardware and control design, of a human-robot collaboration prototype cell for cable harness assembly. In [10], a new cell production assembly system, with human-robot cooperation is developed.…”

Progress and prospects of the human–robot collaboration

“…This is not only to provide cheaper and easily applicable feedback systems can replace full force feedback with none or small performance reduction, but also to resolve fundamental issues such as stability in closed loop [Tegin and Wikander, 2005]. In addition, such sensory substitution techniques can also be used to provide the human with feedback about the advanced robotic perception of the environment (e.g., depth sensors [Plagemann et al, 2010]), that may not be covered by the human sensory system.…”

“…In the field of industrial robotics, many manufacturing applications are also reported in literature, ranging from load-ing and transporting heavy wheels [Levratti et al, 2016], collaborative assembly of a homokinetic mechanical joint [Cherubini et al, 2013, Cherubini et al, 2016 and cellular phones [Tan et al, 2009]. Another application within this field was presented in [Erden and Billard, 2014].…”

“…Although hardware-related components are among the most critical to achieve this goal, a remarkable effort has been recently devoted to overview the underlying progress in terms of communication [Wang et al, 2005], sensing [Tegin and Wikander, 2005], and actuation [Vanderborght et al, 2013a] developments. Hence, our focus in this review will be on other relevant key elements of the HRC, i.e.…”