Drive the Cobots Aright: Guidelines for Industrial Application of Cobots

Abstract

Abstract Collaborative robots (cobots) are a new class of industrial robots with a safe, lightweight structure and easy to program interface. They have received attention from manufacturers seeking to automate some simple and repetitive tasks, while still retaining humans for the remaining ones, thereby taking advantage of their complementary abilities. From an implementation perspective, cobots need to accommodate and potentially benefit from direct human-robot interaction. They have demonstrated a high potential in manual operations where a set of interdependent tasks need to be performed, however, due to the complexity of some of the tasks, a subset of them are kept manual — for example, assembly related tasks. Since they share the same physical space, humans and cobots operate in close proximity, and this directly impacts the cobots’ design and the speed at which they can operate. Therefore, it can be argued that possible advantages of cobots tend to be less dependent on the design of the cobot manipulator itself, and more on its application design. In this work, we investigate the impact of these limitations along with the benefits, and contrast them with conventional high-speed industrial robots. This study explores a manufacturing company that has invested in cobot automation for assembly tasks. Three use-cases of cobots are investigated for their productivity and flexibility against conventional industrial robots. The conclusion is made as a set of guidelines for practitioners for the implementation of cobots both from a product perspective, as well as the perspective of the specific tasks and implementations.