A Formal Control Architecture for Collaborative Robotics Applications

The increasing interest in collaborative robotics applications is mainly due to the flexibility of these robots and to the possibility of saving space on the production shopfloor. On the other hand, physical collaboration is way far from being a commonly adopted practice, and most of the applications only entails a reduced level of interaction. This work addresses the problem of synchronising human and robot activities and proposes a formal control architecture to govern the execution of collaborative application requiring some degree of coordination between the human and the robot. The control architecture is then validated in a realistic collaborative assembly demonstration.