Framework for collaborative human-robot flexible manufacturing applications

Abstract

A growing number of robots collaborating closely with human operators is envisaged to be employed in manufac- turing assembly lines in the next future. It has been demonstrated in many research works that robots increase the productivity and efficiency of the manufacturing process. However, safety is a challenging problem to be considered in human-robot collaborative applications. This work outlines a flexible human- robot collaborative framework, which is the core of a brand new project to be fully developed in the very next future, to provide intuitive and safe human-robot interactions, leveraging mobile robots and manipulators.