Survey on human-robot collaboration in industrial settings: Safety, intuitive interfaces and applications

Easy-to-use collaborative robotics solutions, where human workers and robots share their skills, are entering the market, thus becoming the new frontier in industrial robotics. They allow to combine the advantages of robots, which enjoy high levels of accuracy, speed and repeatability, with the flexibility and cognitive skills of human workers. However, to achieve an efficient human-robot collaboration, several challenges need to be tackled. First, a safe interaction must be guaranteed to prevent harming humans having a direct contact with the moving robot. Additionally, to take full advantage of human skills, it is important that intuitive user interfaces are properly designed, so that human operators can easily program and interact with the robot. In this survey paper, an extensive review on human-robot collaboration in industrial environment is provided, with specific focus on issues related to physical and cognitive interaction. The commercially available solutions are also presented and the main industrial applications where collaborative robotic is advantageous are discussed, highlighting how collaborative solutions are intended to improve the efficiency of the system and which the open issue are.