A Roadmap for the Future Design of Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

Human-robot collaboration systems are a new and interesting approach in the science of robotics. Collaborative robot systems can be used without protective fences in direct interaction with humans. For ongoing developments in human-robot collaboration, further improvements in a multitude of disciplines and research areas are necessary. The scope of interdisciplinary research work in this context is enormous and the scientific field is, due to the high level of interdisciplinarity, quite complex. In the debates within the Ladenburg Discourse⁎ on human-robot collaboration, it was agreed that guidelines for future research and development work would be very useful and would enable researchers to structure and position their work in this wide field. Duplications and redundancies could be avoided, and synergies and cooperations could be promoted. For those reasons, an extended set of thirteen theses is formulated. This paper describes these theses, as a summary of the Ladenburg Discourse, with the intention to provide a roadmap for human-robot collaboration.