Real-World Industrial Demonstrators on Human–Robot Collaborative Assembly

The development of human–robot collaboration (HRC) is expected to have increasing importance in Industry 4.0 for a growing number of companies. The purpose of this chapter is to address the role and relevance of jointly designed, developed and implemented industrial demonstrators of HRC systems in projects, resulting in an increased knowledge—both for academia and industrial partners—of how to successfully present the obtained research results in an industrial environment. In particular, the chapter focuses on the role of demonstrators and presents three perspectives related to the use of demonstrators in bridging the gap between current knowledge and the work practice on the shop floor. One perspective is the joint process of developing three industrial demonstrators of HRC within the SYMBIO-TIC project, in order to provide the envisioned benefits for the addressed industrial requirements from the companies. Another perspective is how to evaluate the intended operators’ perceptions and experiences of these HRC systems from a human’s perspective as well as presenting the results obtained from such an evaluation. The last perspective is the voices raised from the industrial project partners’ views about jointly building industrial demonstrators as well as the benefits of participating in the research project. The chapter ends with conclusions, an identified research challenge and future work. It also addresses the societal impact of using collaborative robots in industry, and their contributions to society.