Let’s Work Together

Enable genuine human-robot
collaboration for performing assembly
tasks in a co-production cell

APPROACH

Key collaboration skills:

Adaptive robot control in collaborative tasks with physically coupled actors;
Collaborative behaviour primitives;
Human touch recognition and classification;
Detection of human intentions for AGVs and professional gesture recognition.

Smart learning of collaborative assembly tasks:

Learning from human demonstration (visual and/or kinaesthetic);
Autonomous assembly policy learning and policy improvement;
Multimodal learning of assembly tasks.

Human monitoring and safety:

Dynamic active constraints construction and enforcements for human safety during HRC;
Monitoring the ergonomic performance of the operator.

Allow efficient production planning by:

Optimising the utilisation of human and robotic resources;
Fast adaptation of co-production cell through reconfigurable hardware.

Are you from manufacturing industry and in need of flexible and affordable automation systems to boost global competitiveness?

CoLLaboratE will allow SMEs and large manufacturing companies in Europe to easily program assembly tasks and flexibly adapt to changes in the production pipeline.

Early adopters: Kolektor Orodjarna, Centro Ricerche FIAT SCPA, Romaero SA and Arçelik A.Ş.

OBJECTIVES

1. To equip the robotic agents with basic collaboration skills easily adaptable to specific tasks.

2. To develop a framework that enables non-experts teaching human-robot collaborative tasks from demonstration

3. The development of technologies that will enable autonomous assembly policy learning and policy improvement.

4. To develop advanced safety strategies allowing effective human robot cooperation with no barriers and ergonomic performance monitoring.

5. To develop techniques for controlling the production line while making optimal use of the resources by generating efficient production plans, employing reconfigurable hardware design, and utilizing AGV’s with increased autonomy.

6. To investigate the impact of human-robot collaboration to the workers’ job satisfaction, as well as test easily applicable interventions in order to increase trust, satisfaction and performance.

7. To validate CoLLaboratE system’s ability to facilitate genuine collaboration between robots and humans.

Traditional manufacturing systems lack the necessary flexibility and reconfigurability that can allow short production cycles and fast deployment of the updated system. Although the use of automation technologies based on industrial robots can increase the adaptability of a production line, the desired flexibility cannot be achieved until abilities for genuine collaboration of the robots with the human workers are developed.

CoLLaboratE will revolutionise the way industrial robots learn to cooperate with human workers for performing new manufacturing tasks, with a special focus on the challenging area of assembly operations. The envisioned system for collaborative assembly will be capable of allocating human and robotic resources for executing the production plan sharing the tasks according to the capabilities of the available actors.