Planning and Execution with Robot Trajectory Generation in Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration

The co-presence of a robot and a human sharing some activities in
an industrial setting constitutes a challenging scenario for control solutions, requiring
highly flexible controllers to preserve productivity and enforce human
safety. Standard methods are not suitable given the lack of methodologies able
to evaluate robot execution time variability, caused by the necessity to continuously
modify/adapt robot motions to grant human safety. This paper presents a
novel dynamic planning system for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) which
leverages an offline motion planning technique and deploys planning and execution
features dealing with temporal uncertainty and kinematics both at planning
and execution time. The proposed system is deployed in a manufacturing case
study for controlling a working cell in which a robot and a human collaborate to
achieve a shared production goal. The approach has been shown to be feasible
and effective in a real case study.