Creating a Better (Safer) Robot and Human Partnership

Robot tech­nol­o­gy is on the brink of yet anoth­er major advance­ment. The goal is increased coop­er­a­tion between robot­ic and human work­ers. Find out what this will mean for robot tech­nol­o­gy and robot users.

Rea­sons for Head­ing in the Direc­tion of Col­lab­o­ra­tion:
Robots and humans bring dif­fer­ent strengths to the table. Indus­tri­al robots are capa­ble of per­form­ing with pre­ci­sion and repeata­bil­i­ty. They are also extreme­ly strong. Humans, on the oth­er hand, offer the abil­i­ty to rea­son and to adapt to ever chang­ing sce­nar­ios and chal­lenges.

If robots and humans can work togeth­er safe­ly, their respec­tive strengths will def­i­nite­ly com­pli­ment one anoth­er. Such col­lab­o­ra­tion will open up new hori­zons for man­u­fac­tur­ing. Thanks to advance­ments in tech­nol­o­gy, it won’t be long before this dream of robot and human coop­er­a­tion becomes a real­i­ty.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, the tech­nol­o­gy has not been suf­fi­cient­ly advanced to accom­mo­date safe robot and human col­lab­o­ra­tion. Robots have been restrict­ed to heav­i­ly safe­guard­ed cell enclo­sures (work­cells).

A safer, adap­tive indus­tri­al robot will be able to work along­side a human — feed­ing parts back and forth, hold­ing some­thing steady while it is worked on, etc. Plus, pro­gram­ming could become more adap­tive and quick if humans could inter­act direct­ly by phys­i­cal­ly guid­ing the robot­ic arm to teach it.

How the Robot Will Evolve:
Changes to the robot manip­u­la­tor, tool­ing, sen­sors, pro­gram­ming, soft­ware, and vision hard­ware, will be nec­es­sary before robots can work along­side humans. Some of these devel­op­ments have already tak­en place.

Already, sev­er­al robot man­u­fac­tur­ers have devel­oped safer robots capa­ble of work­ing in clos­er prox­im­i­ty with humans. KUKA Robot­ics cre­at­ed the LWR (light­weight robot) and ABB Robot­ics built FRI­DA, a dual-arm robot. It’s just a mat­ter of time before oth­er robot man­u­fac­tur­ers cre­ate addi­tion­al manip­u­la­tors. Researchers at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty at Munich have made sig­nif­i­cant head­way with a project called JAHIR: Joint-Action for Humans and Indus­tri­al Robots.

In addi­tion, advance­ments in EOAT, such as the Robo­t­iq Adap­tive Grip­per, are lead­ing the way to more ver­sa­tile robot­ic abil­i­ties and human-robot col­lab­o­ra­tion. A num­ber of dif­fer­ent vision hard­ware and soft­ware options have appeared on the mar­ket recent­ly (for exam­ple: Motoman’s Moto­Sight 3D).

For more infor­ma­tion con­tact the experts at Robots​.com today online or at 877−762−6881.