Collaborative Robotics — State of Art and New Problems

Abstract

The new branch of robotics has been formed nowadays as a collaborative robotics. It seems as a result of the developments in the area of manipulation and mobile robots controlled by human operator. Evolution of robotics intended to enlighten human's work resulted in creation of autonomous robots with multimodal interface which make it possible to control a robot for a human without special training. The safety of such robotic systems is to be guaranteed as for operator himself as for other humans in the working area of robotic system. Development of collaborative robotic systems is connected with the problems of human-robot interaction. The human operator can only observe the behavior of the robotic system and state the new tasks in the form of speech dialogue. From the tasks of movement control the operator comes to the tasks formulation as if he collaborates with a human - assistant. So the interface of operator has to propose him an adequate perception of the current situation and his instructions are to be clear'' for robot - assistant. Important part in the autonomous robot control is the navigation system proving the robot to appreciate the environment and to plan its own way in presence of other moving objects. One of the tasks of control is the robot return in case of communication loss with the operator. The task is more complicated for operator if it is necessary to control a group of autonomous robots to fulfil the tasks of the environment monitoring, radiation or chemical reconnaissance etc. Dialogue control may be enlightened for human by emotional support of speech communication by demonstration of mimic expression of robot's face. The mutual understanding demands also the analysis of the human state by the robot. It is also necessary to pay attention at human possibilities to perceive information and adopt the necessary decision. The possible way of coordination of human-robot possibilities are the linguistic variables application and fuzzy logic inference as on the stage of information perception as on the stage of actions planning and decision adoption. The natural relation of space and time make it more close the human-robot dialogue to the dialogue between human-master and human-assistant. The most important problems of mentioned above were under discussion at the first international conference on collaborative robotics on 2106 and are reflected in the paper.