Development and validation of guidelines for safety in human-robot collaborative assembly systems

Industrial collaborative robotics is one of the most promising technologies of Industry 4.0. In particular, humanrobot collaboration in assembly will be particularly interesting for manufacturing companies. In this context, the interaction between humans and robots opens new possibilities but also challenges. A major problem is related to safety: unwanted and unexpected contacts between the human and the robotic system may cause injuries and therefore limit the potential for collaboration. Nowadays, there is a lack of simple and practical tools for helping system designers in overcoming such limiting conditions. In this work, guidelines for the design of safe humanrobot collaborative assembly are developed and classified, particularly focusing on the features characterizing the entire system. These are validated by means of a laboratory case study and a digital twin. The validation process is based on the assumption that a team of manufacturing engineers (not-experts in occupational health and safety) should be able to autonomously and gradually apply the given guidelines reducing the mechanical risk in a collaborative assembly system. The proposed solutions have been virtually modelled allowing the evaluation of their effectiveness. According to the results, the proposed guidelines effectively help non-expert users in the development and improvement of collaborative assembly systems from the safety perspective.

Automated summary

Industrial collaborative robotics is a promising technology in Industry 4.0, with human-robot collaboration in assembly being particularly interesting. However, safety is a major concern, and there is a lack of practical tools to help system designers overcome limitations. This study develops guidelines for the safe design of human-robot collaborative assembly and validates them through experiments.