Worker Robot Cooperation and Integration into the Manufacturing Workcell via the Holonic Control Architecture
This addresses the problem of enabling efficient human-robot collaboration in manufacturing, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing holonic concept to a specific cooperative scenario.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating human workers and robots in a manufacturing workcell by proposing a holonic control architecture, and demonstrates its feasibility through a case study where a dual-arm robot cooperates with a worker using hand gestures to achieve high production flexibility.
Worker-Robot Cooperation is a new industrial trend, which aims to sum the advantages of both the human and the industrial robot to afford a new intelligent manufacturing techniques. The cooperative manufacturing between the worker and the robot contains other elements such as the product parts and the manufacturing tools. All these production elements must cooperate in one manufacturing workcell to fulfill the production requirements. The manufacturing control system is the mean to connect all these cooperative elements together in one body. This manufacturing control system is distributed and autonomous due to the nature of the cooperative workcell. Accordingly, this article proposes the holonic control architecture as the manufacturing concept of the cooperative workcell. Furthermore, the article focuses on the feasibility of this manufacturing concept, by applying it over a case study that involves the cooperation between a dual-arm robot and a worker. During this case study, the worker uses a variety of hand gestures to cooperate with the robot to achieve the highest production flexibility