Programming-Free Approaches for Human–Robot Collaboration in Assembly Tasks

Collaborative robots are paving the way for new applications, and are becoming the new frontiers, especially in manufacturing industries. The concept of combining the cognitive flexibility of humans and the physical strength of the robots is rapidly gaining interest and is leading to novel application areas. In this chapter, we introduce various challenges faced by collaborative robotic systems. The focus is on the recent development of programming interfaces to efficiently install collaborative robotic systems in manufacturing applications and the requirement for such interfaces. An extensive review on the state-of-the-art programming approaches is given. Detailed description of novel interfaces that build upon and extend the current state of the art is presented. A qualitative comparison against different criteria required to consider while developing programming interfaces is carried out in detail. The main objective of the organisation and content of the chapter is to introduce different programming interfaces and paradigms that can be exploited for easy programming of robots by non-experts