Economic and ergonomic performance enhancement in assembly process through multiple collaboration modes between human and robot

Collaborative robots have open new ways of designing assembly processes, thanks to their ability to share work space with operators. not only may they support the economical performance, but they can also improve the overall ergonomics. Building on existing work on task allocation problems, the authors study further the collaboration opportunities between operator and robot, namely cooperation phases (type of collaboration where both operator and robot act on the same work piece). This work proposes a new formulation of the related problem, and solutions are sought through heuristics methods, to investigate whether concurrent usage of different collaboration modes delivers better performance. The results indicate that cooperation mode enables higher process performances while controlling ergonomic risks. With a concern for real-life application, it has been applied on a real case study to verify its applicability.