Human-Robot Collaboration

People and robots dividing up work and coordinating in the same space to complete a task together.

Human-robot collaboration means people and a robot share a workspace and work on the same task together, rather than the robot being fenced off to work alone; it is a branch of human-robot interaction. It is most common in industry: in 1996, J. Edward Colgate and Michael Peshkin of Northwestern University invented the collaborative robot (cobot), which later grew into a category of lightweight arms that can work right next to people. The International Federation of Robotics divides collaboration into four levels — coexistence, sequential collaboration, simultaneous collaboration, and responsive collaboration — and most factory applications today still sit at the first two levels. Safety is the central concern: ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066 set requirements for collaborative applications, including power-and-force limiting and speed-and-separation monitoring. For embodied AI, as robots move into factories and homes, they also need to read human intent and coordinate with human motion — lifting a table together, or handing a tool back and forth.

ExampleOn an assembly line, a worker aligns a part while a nearby collaborative arm supports the heavier component; the arm automatically slows down when the worker gets close and speeds back up once they step away.

Also called

HRC

Related

Collaborative Robot · Human-Robot Interaction · Physical Human-Robot Interaction · ISO/TS 15066 Robots and Robotic Devices — Collaborative Robots · Power and Force Limiting · Human-Robot Handover

Sources

Cobot - Wikipedia