Survey of methods for design of collaborative robotics applications- Why safety is a barrier to more widespread robotics uptake

Abstract

While collaborative robots have made headlines through recent industrial applications, they are not as widespread in industry as it may seem. The authors of this paper believe that one reason for this slow uptake is due to the high requirements on the safety and the lack of engineering tools for analyzing collaborative robotics applications. Systems engineering provides a good framework for creating the engineering tools needed for faster and more reliable deployment, but has only recently been applied to robotics challenges. In this paper, we discuss the state of the art for designing robotics applications featuring human-robot collaboration (HRC) and then review existing systems engineering approaches, which could offer support. Our review aims to support the robotics community in the future development of engineering tools to better understand, plan, and implement applications featuring collaborative robotics.