Abstract
<p class="Abstract">This paper deals with collaborative robotics by highlighting the main issues linked to the interaction between humans and robots. A critical study of the standards in force on human–robot interaction and the current principles on workplace design for human–robot collaboration (HRC) are presented. The paper focuses on an anthropocentric paradigm in which the human becomes the core of the workplace in combination with the robot, and it presents a basis for designing workplaces through two key concepts: (i) the introduction of human and robot spaces as elementary spaces and (ii) the dynamic variations of the elementary spaces in shape, size and position. According to this paradigm, the limitations of a safety-based approach, introduced by the standards, are overcome by positioning the human and the robot inside the workplace and managing their interaction through the elementary spaces. The introduced concepts, in combination with the safety prescriptions, have been organised by means of a multi-level graph for driving the HRC design phase. The collaborative workplace is separated into sublevels. The main elements of a collaborative workplace are identified and their relationships presented by means of digraphs. </p>
Highlights
Industry 4.0 pillars and technological improvements are pushing manufacturing towards hyper-automated production lines [1]-[3]
In the context of anthropocentric design, we have proposed three levels of detail (Figure 4) in which nodes are associated with different elements depending on their level of belonging, and directed edges always represent the relationships
The human is assumed to be the key to enabling a real collaborative relationship
Summary
Industry 4.0 pillars and technological improvements are pushing manufacturing towards hyper-automated production lines [1]-[3]. Many production applications cannot be implemented without a human presence; many assembly processes need to be performed with human involvement [4], [5] These applications, usually based on multi-stage processes [6], are often characterised by a sequence of human- and robot-led stages. In [20], more details about levels of interaction are provided, and the static and dynamic space concepts are introduced They move from a safety-based approach to one based on interaction assessment. A new prospective design based on an ‘anthropocentric design’ approach is proposed: humans and their interaction with the robot should be at the core of the workplace and design process. With the large use of automated guided vehicles (AGV) and intelligent guided vehicles, standards for collaborative workplaces must address static robots.
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