Human-robot collaborative assembly: a use-case application

Future production plants will see more and more the presence of humans actively collaborating with robots. Typical scenarios are those related to assembly lines. In such contexts the behaviour of humans is not controllable. Therefore the problem is to produce a scheduling for robotic activities accounting for the predicted human intentions. In this work we propose a scheduling strategy based on Time Petri Nets. The sequence of commands scheduled for the robot are executed exploiting the receding horizon principle. The developed approach is applied on a realistic use-case, in which one human operator and a dual-arm robot actively collaborate to perform the assembly of a real product.