A design approach for incorporating task coordination for human-robot-coexistence within assembly systems

Current developments in globalized markets lead to an increasing need for flexible and agile production systems. Especially within automated assembly stations, the human worker still embodies a major role, essentially his adaptability and his problem solving skills in unplanned scenarios, that need to be coordinated in an efficient and safe way. Nevertheless, the physical human safety within human-robot coexistence represents the key requirement for system productivity and acceptance. Along with an optimized deployment of both robotic and human skills, workspace sharing concepts based on human-robot-coexistence enable ergonomic workload distributions. As a result, the establishment of human-centered workplaces is facilitated. This paper presents a framework and major design principles for workspace-sharing concepts incorporating task identification and coordination aspects for assembly systems. The methodology introduced comprises a generic requirement analysis and functional specifications that lead to a generalized solutions space based on a probabilistic multi-agent-system that catches the intricate system interferences between process, product and human worker.