Human-robot collaborative assembly in cyber-physical production: Classification framework and implementation

The production industry is moving towards the next generation of assembly, which is conducted based on safe and reliable robots working in the same workplace alongside with humans. Focusing on assembly tasks, this paper presents a review of human-robot collaboration research and its classification works. Aside from defining key terms and relations, the paper also proposes means of describing human-robot collaboration that can be relied on during detailed elaboration of solutions. A human-robot collaborative assembly system is developed with a novel and comprehensive structure, and a case study is presented to validate the proposed framework. © 2017

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable