IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2020 - 169

INDUSTRY ACTIVITIES

Smart Collaborative Systems for Enabling
Flexible and Ergonomic Work Practices
By Arash Ajoudani, Philipp Albrecht, Matteo Bianchi, Andrea Cherubini, Simona Del Ferraro,
Philippe Fraisse, Lars Fritzsche, Manolo
Garabini, Alberto Ranavolo, Patricia Helen Rosen,
Manolo Garabini,
Massimo Sartori, Nikos Tsagarakis, Bram Vanderborght, and Sascha Wischniewski

T

he manufacturing industry
is among the top wealthgenerating sectors of the global
economy and accounted for
15.3% and 10%, respectively, of the total
European and American workforce in
2018 [1], [2]. Despite its crucial role,
manufacturing is facing a critical
challenge based on a reduction of skilled
labor availability. This trend is imposing a bottleneck on growth due to the
demands of an increasingly competitive
market. The aging workforce is not
helping this shortfall either, as the
available workforce is less able to perform
burdensome industrial tasks in an
efficient and productive manner.
Efforts are being made to respond to
such challenges in manufacturing scenarios and to promote higher quality
and more efficient operations. Manufacturing automation by means of
robots is widely known as a promising
approach to combat such human-centric issues that have been brought about
by inherited layouts and processes. Such
automation efforts attempt to make
complex operations easier for employees to comprehend and support the
completion of physically demanding
tasks. However, today's solutions require
huge initial investments and are often
bespoke for particular scenarios; hence,
they are not flexible enough to cover all
of the requirements of a dynamic, highmix production environment, typical
for small and medium enterprises.
These solutions also demand and to a
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2020.2985344
Date of current version: 10 June 2020

certain extent dictate very specific layouts and work-cell formats that are
"robot friendly" [3].
Toward a unified perspective of
boosting the competitiveness of the
European manufacturing industry, in
2012, the European Commission set
the goal of raising manufacturing's
share of gross domestic product in
Europe from 15% to 20% by 2020 [4]. In
this direction, more companies have
been encouraged to realize the potential of Industry 4.0 to achieve higher
levels of automation, autonomous processes and machinery, and data
exchange in manufacturing domains to
respond to the customization needs of
the future. Customized products are
best produced close to the market to
quickly respond to customer needs
and reduce delivery times. This change
implies challenges to the way work and
resources are organized within a factory to guarantee cost-effective productivity and quality and reduce waste.
In this vision, human-robot collaboration (HRC) frameworks have a high
potential because they combine human
beings' creativity and craftsmanship
with the precision, repetition speed,
and consistency of robots to perform
complex, skill-demanding tasks while
improving work ergonomics. In addition, they can be redeployed to other
tasks much more easily. The quality
of industrial production is improved,
the yield of smaller lot sizes is increased, and the working conditions
for humans are improved [3]. In fact,
HRC has been a crucial enabler of the
current industrial revolution and will

be at the core of the upcoming fifth
industrial revolution [6].
To create HRC systems that can
radically increase the flexibility and
productivity of manufacturing while
improving the ergonomics of the workplace, four fundamental aspects, i.e.,
technology, flexibility, interaction quality, and standardization, must be covered comprehensively (see Figure 1).
This has been the aim of the first wave
of projects with the development of
collaborative robots (cobots) (e.g., in
Europe, AMARSI, SAPHARI, and
PHRIENDS) and, subsequently, with
the development of their control and
high-level interfaces (e.g., in Europe,
the SOPHIA project, whose motto
is "human-centered and modular
design"). Two distinct objectives of the
new wave are to improve competitiveness [3] and reduce work-related musculoskeletal disorders, which represent
the single largest category of industrial
diseases in first-world counties [7].
HRC Technology
Several technologies must be in place to
enable humans and robots to work
together to achieve shared goals. In the
next sections, we place our focus on
human monitoring, sensing and feedback interfaces, and shared intelligence
aspects of HRC technology, which have
been less discussed in HRC literature in
comparison to the traditional safety and
control aspects of cobots.
Human Kinodynamic Monitoring
The traditional solutions used for the
ergonomic monitoring of industrial

JUNE 2020

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2020

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