Abstract

Human-Robot Collaborative (HRC) workcells could enhance the inclusive employment of human workers regardless their force or skills. Collaborative robots not only substitute humans in dangerous and heavy tasks, but also make the related processes within the reach of all workers, overcoming lack of skills and physical limitations. To enable the full exploitation of collaborative robots traditional robot programming must be overcome. Reduction of robot programming time and worker cognitive effort during the job become compelling requirements to be satisfied. Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a core role to allow robot to adapt to a changing and unstructured environment and to human undependable execution of repetitive tasks. The paper focuses on the utilization of RL to allow a robust industrial assembly process in a HRC workcell. The result of the study is a method for the online generation of robot assembly task sequence that adapts to the unpredictable and inconstant behavior of the human co-workers. The method is presented with the help of a benchmark case study.

Highlights

  • Process impacts both the quality of product and the process efficiency

  • If the human forced a state belonging to an acceptable task sequence, though not the optimal one, the Reinforcement learning (RL) agent switches on the new task sequence

  • If the human forces a state belonging to a wrong sequence, the robot disassemble last part and from this point proposes the nearest task sequence that allows to complete the assembly

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Summary

Introduction

Process impacts both the quality of product and the process efficiency. The challenge is transferring concepts sedimented in mass production to small assembly through the introduction of innovative techno– logies in robot automation [1].Human-Robot Collaborative workcells (HRC) emp– loy collaborative robots, light weight, highly flexible, easy to program and intrinsically safe.

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