Virtual Reality Platform for Design and Evaluation of the Interaction in Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks in Assembly Manufacturing

Sammanfattning: Industry is on the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution where smart factories area necessity to meet customer demands for increasing volumes of individualized products. Within the smart factory, cyber-physical production systems are becoming important to deal with changing production. Human-robot collaboration is an example of a cyber-physical system in which humans and robots share a workspace. By introducing robots and humans into the same working cell, the two can collaborate by allowing the robot to deal with heavy lifting, repetitive, and high accuracy tasks, while the human focuses on tasks that need intelligence, flexibility, and adaptability. There are few such collaborative applications in industry today. In the implementations that actually exist, the robots are mainly working side-by-side with humans rather than truly collaborating. Three main factors that limit the widespread application of human-robot collaboration can be identified: lack of knowledge regarding suitable human-robot collaboration tasks, lack of knowledge regarding efficient communication technologies for enabling interaction between humans and robots when carrying out tasks, and lack of efficient ways to safely analyze and evaluate collaborative tasks.The overall aim of this thesis is to address these problems and facilitate and improve interaction between humans and robots, with a special focus on assembly manufacturing tasks. To fulfill this aim, an assembly workstation for human-robot collaboration has been developed and implemented both physically and virtually. A virtual reality platform called ViCoR has been developed that can be used to investigate, evaluate, and analyze the interaction between humans and robots and thereby facilitate the implementation of new human-robot collaboration cells. The workstation developed has also been used for data collection and experiments during the thesis work, and used to extract knowledge of how the interaction between human and robot can be improved.