Safe Human-Robot Collaboration Combines Expertise and Precision in Manufacturing: A Paradigm for Industrial Assembly in Mixed Environments

摘要

During the past decade, the interest in safe human-robot collaboration (HRC) for applications in industrial production has developed from a niche research topic to a broad effort encompassing activities from basic research to application profiles and from standardization to biomechanics and ergonomics. The driving force behind the entire effort is the vision that practically relevant industrial scenarios will include both human workers with their specific expertise and robotic production assistants with their characteristic strengths, combining forces to empower a production facility with superior productivity and flexibility. A drawback of present prototypical HRC implementations is that the basic reaction in the event of an impending risk to a human worker is to stop robot motion, thus interrupting the application and curtailing productivity.