Digital Twin Enabled Framework for Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration

Industrial robots are systems used for manufacturing. Industrial robots allow for accomplishing automated tasks with high endurance, speed, and precision. However, industrial robots are typically enclosed within fences to guarantee human safety. A new generation of collaborative robots (cobots) is designed to collaborate with humans in an open workspace. Significant advances have regarded critical functional requirements and mechanisms for safety, collaboration variants and standardisations. As a result, cobots have become robust and suitable to be progressively introduced in manufacturing applications. Cobots are attractive for large, small and medium enterprises. Their capability to work alongside humans removes the requirement to confine them within a fenced space and makes them flexible manufacturing tools. In order to unlock the potential of cobots and speed up the exploitation of collaborative robotics in flexible manufacturing environments, research is needed to continue empowering cobots with ergonomic features, real-time sensing capabilities and controls, human-robot interfaces, and intuitive and task-driven programming. This work describes a framework being developed to facilitate the employment of human-robot collaboration in industrial assembly applications. Such a framework is enabled by a digital twin of the system.