Transitional or partnership human and robot collaboration for automotive assembly

Abstract

Traditional automotive manufacturing tasks that are automated to date by industrial robots utilize a human robot exclusion strategy for normal production. Although new generations of robots are envisioned to emulate humans' capabilities to collaborate with people, we propose a near term and a practical strategy for robots to complement humans' capabilities instead in order to achieve a shared goal in a shared context of manufacturing task execution. We describe two types, transitional and partnership, of human and robot collaborations in the automotive manufacturing environment. We illustrate both types of human robot collaboration with detailed manufacturing tasks. We explore potential solutions to the human and robot collaboration problem in manufacturing: how to interact optimally and fail-safely for a given task collaboration between a human and a robot.