Control Model for Collaborative Manufacturing: An Integrated Opened Framework for Human-Robot Collaboration

Collaborative robots represent an interesting solution to automate tasks that were too difficult or too expensive to automate since they merge the flexibility of a human operator and the accuracy of automated systems. This work presents a framework developed in three levels with a top-down approach. A first offline level will solve the task scheduling problem of a human-robot collaborative workcell addressing both logistic and robotic aspects, represented by physical interferences and performance indexes. A second level will manage the shared workspace in real-time. These first two levels, due to their general nature, will be described in greater detail. The possible application and validation of the model to a specific case study will be discussed in the third level, which will describe the connection of the model towards different devices.