A Safety-Aware Architecture for Task Scheduling and Execution for Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

In collaborative robotic applications, human and robot have to work together to accomplish a common job, composed by a set of tasks. In order to achieve an efficient human-robot collaboration (HRC), it is important to have an integration between a proper task scheduling strategy and a task execution strategy. The first must deal with the variability of the two agents, while the second must deal with the safety standards. In this paper, we propose an integrated architecture for task scheduling and execution in a collaborative cell. The tasks are dynamically scheduled handling the uncertainity in both the human and the robot behaviors. Subsequently, at the execution level, the task is accomplished computing trajectories comply with the safety regulations. The planning information are mutually integrated in real-time with the scheduling procedure in order improve the HRC.