Mapping socio-technical dependencies to enable the successful adoption of collaborative robots in industry

Abstract

Collaborative robots (cobots) allow for combining complementary strengths of humans and robots. However, this close human-cobot interaction creates a highly complex socio-technical system. This is a key adoption and integration challenge as it complicates an understanding of dependencies between cobots and their surrounding workplace: while a cobot needs to fit to the product to be manipulated, the human operator and the workplace, those three domains also need to be adjusted to allow for a successful cobot use. This paper presents a matrix-based approach to analyze dependencies between the four domains; (1) cobot, (2) product, (3) human/operator, and (4) workplace.