An integrated framework for human-robot collaborative assembly in hybrid manufacturing cells

Abstract

Recently, lightweight and flexible robots have been introduced for human-robot collaborative manufacturing. However, most of the research in this field focuses on the physical aspects of the interaction only. Nevertheless, psychological and social impact of human-robot collaboration (HRC) on manufacturing needs to be addressed and embedded in the design as well such that the robot actions become acceptable and comfortable for the human. Motivated by this need, we propose an integrated physical and social HRC framework for assembly tasks in a hybrid manufacturing cell. To address human physical demands, the robot motion control will be developed to keep pace with human motion during the task. Furthermore, psychological human factors will also be taken into account into the robot motion control for better HRC. More specifically, we consider a computational model of a human worker's trust in his/her robot partner and use the trust evaluation as a constraint in an optimal control problem. Finally, we run a pilot study to test our proposed framework.