A Framework for Human-aware Collaborative Robotics Systems Development

In the last decade, the manufacturing domain has been marked by a veritable flood of technological breakthroughs. Collaborative robotics, in particular, has enabled workstations to be shared between humans and their robotic counterparts. The ability of collaborative robots to work side-by-side with humans has opened up new possibilities for task and activity design in manufacturing. However, despite the promising outlook, actual collaboration between humans and cobots in existing applications is very limited, so the potential of the technology is only partially realised. In this paper, a framework is proposed to help practitioners and researchers in implementing human-aware collaborative robotics systems. The framework supported the development of a collaborative screwdriving application in which both the operator and the robot support and perceive each other to optimise process performance and worker well-being.