A Framework for Hybrid Cells That Support Safe and Efficient Human-Robot Collaboration in Assembly Operations

In this paper, we present a framework to build hybrid cells that support safe and efficient human-robot collaboration during assembly operations. Our approach considers a representative one-robot one-human model in which a human and a robot asynchronously work toward assembling a product. Whereas the human retrieves parts from a bin and brings them into the robot workspace, the robot picks up parts from its workspace and assembles them into the product. Using this collaboration model, we explicate the design details of the overall framework comprising three modules — plan generation, system state monitoring, and contingency handling. We provide details of the virtual cell and the physical cell used to implement our framework. Finally, we report results from human-robot collaboration experiments to illustrate our approach.