The influence of collision avoidance strategies on human-robot collaborative systems

Collaborative robots improve the traditional production systems, both automatic and manual, by allowing the resources to share the workspace. However, the shared workspace is both the greatest advantage and limit of collaborative robots. Indeed, interference between the human operator and the cobot may result in an emergency stop, reducing the performance of the system. Hence, a collision avoidance strategy is required to avoid collision; however, this may affect the performance of the system. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how the shared workspace affects the system performance, and the effects of the adoption of a collision avoidance strategy. To this regard, a collision avoidance strategy has been developed and it is presented in this work and an experimental validation proved the efficacy of the proposed strategy. Lastly, simulation tests were carried out to analyse the performance of the system for different sizes of the collaboration area with respect to the workspace. The results shows that, while the increase in the collaboration area reduces the performance of the system, collision avoidance strategies mitigate this effect.