Advancing Assembly Through Human-Robot Collaboration: Framework and Implementation

The chapter presents a framework for establishing human-robot collaborative assembly in industrial environments. To achieve this, the chapter first reviews the subject state of the art and then addresses the challenges facing researchers. The chapter provides two examples of human-robot collaboration. The first is a scenario where a human is remotely connected to an industrial robot, and the second is where a human collaborates locally with a robot on a shop floor. The chapter focuses on the human-robot collaborative assembly of mechanical components, both on-site and remotely. It also addresses sustainability issues from the societal perspective. The main research objective is to develop safe and operator-friendly solutions for human-robot collaborative assembly within a dynamic factory environment. The presented framework is evaluated using defined scenarios of distant and local assembly operations when the experimental results show that the approach is capable of effectively performing human-robot collaborative assembly tasks.