Human-robot Collaboration for Bin-picking Tasks to Support Low-volume Assemblies

In this paper, we present a framework to create hybrid cells that enable safe and efficient human-robot collaboration (HRC) during industrial assembly tasks. We present our approach in the context of bin-picking, which is the first task performed before products are assembled in certain low-volume production scenarios. We consider a representative one-robot one-human model in which a human and a robot asynchronously work toward assembling a product. The model exploits complimentary strengths of either agents: Whereas the robot performs bin-picking and subsequently assembles each picked-up part to build the product, the human assists the robot in critical situations by (1) resolving any perception and/or grasping problems encountered during bin-picking and (2) performing dexterous fine manipulation tasks required during assembly. We explicate the design details of our overall framework comprising three modules: plan generation, system state monitoring, and contingency handling. We use illustrative examples to show different regimes where human-robot collaboration can occur while carrying out the bin-picking task.