Integrated task sequence planning and assignment for human-robot collaborative assembly station

Human-robot collaborative assembly (HRCA) can give full play to their respective advantages and significantly improve assembly efficiency. Rational assembly sequences and task assignment schemes facilitate an efficient and smooth assembly process. This paper proposes a method of integrated assembly sequence planning and task assignment for HRCA based on the genetic algorithm (GA). Firstly, a part assembly process is decomposed into positioning task and connection task, which include a series of activities from the practical application aspect. Then, a dual-task precedence graph model for product assembly is accordingly constructed. Subsequently, GA is used to integrate assembly sequence planning and task assignment in HRCA considering time, complexity, and coherence as optimization objectives. By using Gantt charts, a chromosome encoding and decoding method based on human-robot collaborative assembly state diagrams in collaborative work is proposed to express assembly sequences and task assignment schemes. Finally, assembly process simulation is conducted to slightly adjust the assignment result considering potential collision in the shared time and space during HRCA. The case studies illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a method of integrated assembly sequence planning and task assignment based on the genetic algorithm for human-robot collaborative assembly (HRCA), aiming to improve assembly efficiency by rational task assignment.