Collaborative Assembly in Hybrid Manufacturing Cells: An Integrated Framework for Human–Robot Interaction

Recent emergence of safe, lightweight, and flexible robots has opened a new realm for human-robot collaboration in manufacturing. Utilizing such robots with the new human-robot interaction (HRI) functionality to interact closely and effectively with a human co-worker, we propose a novel framework for integrating HRI factors (both physical and social interactions) into the robot motion controller for human-robot collaborative assembly tasks in a manufacturing hybrid cell. To meet human physical demands in such assembly tasks, an optimal control problem is formulated for physical HRI (pHRI)-based robot motion control to keep pace with human motion progress. We further augment social HRI (sHRI) into the framework by considering a computational model of the human worker's trust in his/her robot partner as well as robot facial expressions. The human worker's trust in robot is computed and used as a metric for path selection as well as a constraint in the optimal control problem. Robot facial expression is displayed for providing additional visual feedbacks to the human worker. We evaluate the proposed framework by designing a robotic experimental testbed and conducting a comprehensive study with a human-in-the-loop. Results of this paper show that compared to the manual adjustments of robot velocity, an autonomous controller based on pHRI, pHRI and sHRI with trust, or pHRI and sHRI with trust, and emotion result in 34%, 39%, and 44% decrease in human workload and 21%, 32%, and 60% increase in robot's usability, respectively. Compared to the manual framework, human trust in robot increases by 38% and 42%, respectively, in the latter two autonomous frameworks. Moreover, the overall efficiency in terms of assembly time remains the same.