ROBO-PARTNER Motivation
The latest trends in EU manufacturing foster the co-existence of humans and robots under a collaborative environment, sharing both workplaces and tasks, in order make the most out of the synergy effect. To this direction, great advancements have been made in the cooperation of human with lightweight robots1, 2, 3, 4. However, such safe human robot collaborative systems and robots have limited reachability, small payload and require high investment cost. In this context, in order to provide added value results, further research is required in the field of safe human robot cooperation with industrial robots.
The advantages of industrial robots are not exploited in their full potential within the European production plants5. The main reasons for which companies do not use robots yet involve6:
- Challenges in adopting new technologies:
- Lack of flexible equipment for highly dexterous operations
- Absence of user friendly programming techniques and interfaces
- Difficulty to maintain and operate by non – expert users.
- Cases where complete automation cannot be achieved
- Lack of safety systems to supervise human robot workspace sharing and cooperation
- Lack of tools for planning of both human and robot tasks
- Unclear benefits.
ROBO-PARTNER project aims to address and provide solution in the lifecycle of the production systems in the following areas:
ROBO-PARTNER Expected Benefits
References
2. http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/
3. http://www.universal-robots.com/about-universal-robots/news-centre/universal-robots-launches-ur3/
4. http://new.abb.com/products/robotics/yumi
5. European Business Test Panel (EBTP)
6. IFR International Federation of Robotics: www.ifr.gr Last accessed 5 September 2015
