Robots and COVID-19: Challenges in integrating robots for collaborative automation

06/01/2020
by   Ali Ahmad Malik, et al.
0

Objective: The status of human-robot collaboration for assembly applications is reviewed and key current challenges for the research community and practitioners are presented. Background: As the pandemic of COVID-19 started to surface the manufacturers went under pressure to address demand challenges. Social distancing measures made fewer people available to work. In such situations, robots were pointed at to support humans to address a shortage in supply. An important activity where humans are needed in a manufacturing value chain is assembly. HRC assembly systems are supposed to safeguard coexisting humans, perform a range of actions, and often need to be reconfigured to handle product variety. This requires them to be resilient and adaptable to various configurations during their operational life. Besides the potential advantages of using robots the challenges of using them in an industrial assembly are enormous. Methods: This mini-review summarizes the challenges of industrial deployment of collaborative robots for assembly applications. Applications: The documented challenges highlight the future research directions in human-robot interaction for industrial applications.

READ FULL TEXT
research
06/15/2020

Digital twins for collaborative robots: a case study

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) can expand the level of automation in ar...
research
02/01/2021

Human-Robot Interaction: Applications

Recently, human-robot interaction (HRI) is an extensive research topic a...
research
04/15/2020

Reconfiguring and ramping-up ventilator production in the face of COVID-19: Can robots help?

As the COVID-19 pandemic expands, the shortening of medical equipment is...
research
07/04/2020

Sensor-Based Control for Collaborative Robots: Fundamentals, Challenges and Opportunities

The objective of this paper is to present a systematic review of existin...
research
06/15/2020

Man, machine and work in a digital twin setup: a case study

This paper explores the opportunities of using a digital twin to address...
research
08/16/2020

Applications of Robots for COVID-19 Response

This paper reviews 262 reports appearing between March 27 and July 4, 20...
research
04/18/2023

GoferBot: A Visual Guided Human-Robot Collaborative Assembly System

The current transformation towards smart manufacturing has led to a grow...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset