A human-oriented design process for collaborative robotics

The potential of collaborative robotics often does not materialize in an efficient design of the human-robot collaboration. Technology-oriented approaches are no longer enough in the Industry 4.0 era. This work proposes a set of methods to support manufacturing engineers in the human-oriented design process of integrated production systems to obtain satisfactory performance in the mass customization paradigm, without impacting the safety and health of workers. It founds the design criteria definition on five main pillars (safety, ergonomics, effectiveness, flexibility, and costs), favors the consideration of different design alternatives, and leads their selection. The dynamic impact of the design choices on the various elements of the system prevails over the static design constraints. The method has been experimented in collaboration with the major kitchen manufacturer in Italy, which introduced a collaborative robotics cell in the drawers' assembly line. It resulted in a more balanced production line (10% more), a verified risk minimization (RULA score reduced from 5 to 3 and OCRA score from 13.30 to 5.70), and a greater allocation of operators to high added value activities

An approach of service modeling for the demand-driven implementation of Human-Robot-Interaction in manufacturing

Even by providing benefits as a solution for increasing flexibility in manufacturing human-robot-interaction (HRI) still lacks reasonable industrial use cases, especially in small and mid-sized enterprises (SME). Most SME are confused due to the promised multiple benefits not matching their specific requirements. Furthermore, they do have very individual starting points regarding their needs, available process data and documentation. However, there had been analyses on different benefits of HRI for manufacturing and methods to identify individual motivation. The multi-layer approach of service modelling provides a methodology to fulfil an overall goal by achieving predefined subgoals with different methods. Thereby each manufacturing company can choose the most suitable methodology to analyze its production line. Regarding HRI it is possible to select workstations with the most suited benefits for the individual requirements. In this paper, a service modeling approach for the selection of workstations for an implementation of HRI is presented