Tools and Methods for Human Robot Collaboration: Case Studies at i-LABS

Abstract

The collaboration among humans and machines is one of the most relevant topics in the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Collaborative robotics owes part of the enormous impact it has had in small and medium size enterprises to its innate vocation for close cooperation between human operators and robots. The i-Labs laboratory, which is introduced in this paper, developed some case studies in this sense involving different technologies at different abstraction levels to analyse the feasibility of human-robot interaction in common, yet challenging, application scenarios. The ergonomics of the processes, safety of operators, as well as effectiveness of the cooperation are some of the aspects under investigation with the main objective of drawing to these issues the attention from industries who could benefit from them.

Improving Postural Ergonomics during Human–Robot Collaboration Using Particle Swarm Optimization: A Study in Virtual Environment

“…Another advantage is safety due to the lack of physical risks associated with interacting with real robots, especially at the early stages of system development. Other advantages are low cost and no robot maintenance costs [31][32][33]. Additionally, the virtual environment provides a close-to-reality simulated environment to study task performance in work environments and workers' ergonomics [34,35].…”

Advances of Machine Design in Italy 2022

“…Paper [12] deals with combined experimental and statistical approaches to evaluate the vibrational behavior of a gas micro-turbine supplied with different pure fuels and admixed with rapeseed oils. In [13], some case studies are presented and discussed concerning tools and methodologies for Human-robot collaboration that are developed at the I-Lab laboratory of Università Politecnica delle Marche (Ancona, Italy). In [14], the dynamic sub structuring technique is employed to predict the vibrational behavior of a three-point linkage, in order to determine the frequency response functions, the natural frequencies and the mode shapes of the mechanism in a wide range of configurations.…”