Flexible human-robot cooperation models for assisted shop-floor tasks

Abstract The Industry 4.0 paradigm emphasizes the crucial benefits that collaborative robots, i.e., robots able to work alongside and together with humans, could bring to the whole production process. In this context, a yet unreached enabling technology is the design of robots able to deal at all levels with humans’ intrinsic variability, which is not only a necessary element to a comfortable working experience for humans, but also a precious capability for efficiently dealing with unexpected events. In this paper, a sensing, representation, planning and control architecture for flexible human–robot cooperation, referred to as FlexHRC, is proposed. FlexHRC relies on wearable sensors for human action recognition, AND/OR graphs for the representation of and the reasoning upon human–robot cooperation models online, and a Task Priority framework to decouple action planning from robot motion planning and control.