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Collaborative teams of human operators and mobile ground robots are becoming popular in manufacturing plants to assist humans with a lot of the repetitive tasks such as the packing of related objects into different units, an operation known as kitting. In this paper, we present an ontology to provide a unified representation of all kitting-related tasks, which are decomposed into atomic actions that are either computational involving sensing, perception, planning, and control, or physical involving actuation and manipulation. The ontology is then used in a stochastic integer linear program for optimum partitioning of the atomic tasks between the robots and humans. Preliminary experiments on a single robot, single human case yield promising results where the kitting operations are completed with lower durations and manipulation failure rates using human-robot partnership versus just the human or only the robot. This success is achieved by the robot seeking human assistance for visual perception tasks while performing the other tasks primarily on its own.

Abstract：Constraint based path planning plays an important role in cable layout design (CLD) problem. Currently the constraints like physical ones are not well taken into account in cable routing with low efficiency under three-dimensional environment. An anytime RRT based method for cable automatic routing is presented. The method first computes an initial path from the start point to the goal point using combined anytime algorithm and bidirectional attractive rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT) algorithm, which can solve both length constraint and searching efficiency. To refine the initial path, it is pulled to the structure surface by performing the proposed obstacle based magnetic attraction (OBMA) algorithm. Finally the Cosserat elastic rod theory is used for the physical properties modeling of cable to generate the accurate pose of all the fixed cables. Several typical situations are selected to test the performance of the algorithm and we also test the effect by implementing our method on an electrical product with the cable routing system.

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In this paper, we present a framework to build hybrid cells that support safe and efficient human-robot collaboration during assembly operations. Our approach considers a representative one-robot one-human model in which a human and a robot asynchronously work toward assembling a product. Whereas the human retrieves parts from a bin and brings them into the robot workspace, the robot picks up parts from its workspace and assembles them into the product. Using this collaboration model, we explicate the design details of the overall framework comprising three modules — plan generation, system state monitoring, and contingency handling. We provide details of the virtual cell and the physical cell used to implement our framework. Finally, we report results from human-robot collaboration experiments to illustrate our approach.

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