Human-robot collaboration in cellular manufacturing: Design and development

• Published in: 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems pp. 29 - 34
• Main Authors: Tan, J., Feng Duan, Ye Zhang, Watanabe, K., Kato, R., Arai, T.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2009
• Subjects: Cellular manufacturing; Collaboration; Collaborative work; Design optimization; Humans; Production; Prototypes; Robotic assembly; Robots; Safety
• ISBN: 9781424438037; 1424438039
• ISSN: 2153-0858
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2009.5354155

The challenge of this work is to study the design and development of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in cellular manufacturing. Based on the concept of human collaborative design, four main design factors are being identified and developed in an active HRC prototype production cell for cable harness assembly. Human collaborative design aims to optimize the system design for the advantage of collaboration between human and robots based on human considerations. Task modeling approach is developed to study and analyze the task in order to identify the collaboration tasks to develop the collaboration planning. In the collaboration safety development, five safety designs, cover both hardware and control design, are proposed and developed in the prototype system. Risk assessment is conducted to verify the safety design. Two main experiments were conducted as preliminary study to investigate mental workload in HRC. A multimodal information support system is developed in the study of man-machine interface in this work to provide a comprehensive human-robot interface to facilitate human operator. The system performance evaluation had proven the improvement of prototype production cell with HRC design for cellular manufacturing.