Design of Timeline-Based Planning Systems for Safe Human-Robot Collaboration

During the last decade, industrial collaborative robots have entered assembly cells supporting human workers in repetitive and physical demanding operations. Such human-robot collaboration (HRC) scenarios entail many open issues. The deployment of highly flexible and adaptive plan-based controllers is capable of preserving productivity while enforcing human safety is then a crucial requirement. The deployment of plan-based solutions entails knowledge engineers and roboticists interactions in order to design well-suited models of robotic cells considering both operational and safety requirements. So, the ability of supporting knowledge engineering for integrating high level and low level control (also from non-specialist users) can facilitate deployment of effective and safe solutions in different industrial settings. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of some recent results concerning the development of a task planning and execution technology and its integration with a state of the art Knowledge Engineering environment to deploy safe and effective solutions in realistic manufacturing HRC scenarios. We will briefly present and discuss a HRC use case to demonstrate the effectiveness of such integration discussing its advantages.