An Overview of Human-Robot Collaboration in Smart Manufacturing

Abstract

Industry 4.0, also termed smart manufacturing, has revolutionized the industrial world with cutting-edge technologies such as collaborative robots and artificial intelligence etc. Productivity and efficiency are two key factors that determine the success level of manufacturing. Therefore, many manufacturers have become so eager to adopt adaptive, intuitive, collaborative and smart techniques to improve the production lines, including key manufacturing machines and equipment. Therefore, robotic systems are playing an increasingly vital role in many industrial sectors, as they decrease the need for human labour and increase automation level. In addition, material waste can be also reduced since robots provide stability and accuracy during work. In turn, production times are reduced as well. Consequently, smart manufacturing areas need more advanced, flexible, and smart robotic systems to respond to market size changes and customization processes. As a result, currently, great research efforts are made to enrich the interactions between humans and robots in the work environment. This paper presents an overview of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) systems being employed in smart manufacturing to exploit the benefits of human experience and the capabilities of robotic systems. The research gaps, challenges and future work directions on HRC are highlighted and analyzed towards smart manufacturing.

Defining human-AI teaming the human-centered way: a scoping review and network analysis

“…Paradoxically, a differentiated understanding emerges in some of the papers: "interaction" denotes shared workspace and task execution with sequential order or just any contact between human and AI, "cooperation" involves access to shared resources to gather task-related information, but retains separate work interests, and "collaboration" entails humans and technologies working together on complex, common tasks. However, this differentiation that is very established in human-robot interaction research (see, e.g., Othman and Yang, 2022), is not consistently reflected within the majority of papers within our network. Except for O 'Neill et al's (2022) paper, the term "teaming" is underdefined or unclassified in other works.…”

“…Thus, the understanding of collaboration in cluster 4 is similar to the understanding in Cluster 3, differentiating between distinct roles in collaboration as in Cluster 2. The roles that were distinguished in this cluster are the human as a (a) supervisor, (b) subordinate part or (c) peer of the robot (Othman and Yang, 2022). A unique property of cluster 4 involved collaboration that could occur through explicit physical contact or also in a contactless, information-based manner (Mukherjee et al, 2022).…”

“…A unique property of cluster 4 involved collaboration that could occur through explicit physical contact or also in a contactless, information-based manner (Mukherjee et al, 2022). The authors shared the understanding that "collaboration [is] one particular case of interaction" (Castro et al, 2021, p. 5;Othman and Yang, 2022) and that this type of interaction will become even more relevant in the future, aiming to "perceive the [technology] as a full-fledged partner" (Galin and Meshcheryakov, 2021, p. 183). However, more research on human-related variables would be needed to implement this in what has been largely a technologydominated research area (Semeraro et al, 2022).…”

Human–Robot Collaborations in Smart Manufacturing Environments: Review and Outlook

“…This research article presents an extended version of a conference paper [ 4 ], aiming to provide a comprehensive analysis of human–robot collaboration in smart manufacturing. The methodology employed in this study involved a literature review and an expansion of the previous conference paper’s content.…”