Collaboration Planning by Task Analysis in Human-Robot Collaborative Manufacturing System

Abstract

The shifting manufacturing requirements to high flexibility and short production cycle have urged the emerging of human-robot collaborative type of manufacturing systems. Humanrobot collaboration is a dream combination of human flexibility and machine efficiency. However, in order to materialize this paradigm shift in manufacturing history, the interaction between human and robot in the perspective of collaborative operation has to be fully investigated. Many studies had been conducted in the area of human-robot collaboration in manufacturing (Kosuge et al., 1994; Oborski, 2004). Modeling techniques (Rudas & Horvath, 1996) provide an initial step to study on this collaboration relationship even before system development. To ensure a more human-centered solution, task analysis is adapted for the modeling approach in this study. The purpose of this work is to develop a modeling framework based on task analysis approach to assist human-robot collaboration planning in manufacturing systems. The entire development of this work is illustrated in a modeling development of an actual cable harness assembly in a prototype cellular manufacturing system (Duan et al., 2008). The outline of the paper is arranged as the following: Section 2 provides the literature reviews on human-robot collaboration in manufacturing and the overview of the prototype cellular manufacturing system setup together with the assigned cable harness assembly operation. Section 3 presents entire development of collaboration planning by task analysis including the brief introduction on task analysis approach, task decomposition by hierarchical task analysis, and collaboration analysis. Section 4 discusses the design enhancements by the modeling framework in operation process design and further extensions in human skill analysis, safety assessment and operation support. The modeling design is implemented in a prototype production cell to perform model validation and operation performance evaluation as illustrated in Section 5. Section 6 concludes the work and states the suggestions for future work. 6