The coordinated assurance of interrelated critical properties, such as system safety and cyber-security, is one of the toughest challenges in critical systems engineering. In this chapter, we summarise approaches to the coordinated assurance of safety and security. Then, we highlight the state of the art and recent challenges in human-robot collaboration in manufacturing both from a safety and security perspective. We conclude with a list of procedural and technological issues to be tackled in the coordinated assurance of collaborative industrial robots.
Institute of Electronics and Informatics Engineering of Aveiro, University of Aveiro（阿威罗大学阿威罗电子与信息工程研究院）；University of Aveiro（阿威罗大学）；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral（海岸高等理工学院）
Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is necessary. To ensure this, collaborative cells are equipped with a large set of sensors of multiple modalities, covering the entire work volume. However, the fusion of information from all these sensors requires an accurate extrinsic calibration. The calibration of such complex systems is challenging, due to the number of sensors and modalities, and also due to the …
University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学）；Arts et Métiers（法国国立高等工程技术学院）
Human-robot collision avoidance is a key in collaborative robotics and in the framework of Industry 4.0. It plays an important role for achieving safety criteria while having humans and machines working side-by-side in unstructured and time-varying environment. This study introduces the subject of manipulator's on-line collision avoidance into a real industrial application implementing typical sensors and a commonly used collaborative industrial manipulator, KUKA iiwa. In the proposed methodology, the human co-worker and the robot are represented by geometric primitives (capsules). The minimum…
Human-robot collaborations have been recognized as an essential component for future factories. It remains challenging to properly design the behavior of those co-robots. Those robots operate in dynamic uncertain environment with limited computation capacity. The design objective is to maximize their task efficiency while guaranteeing safety. This paper discusses a set of design principles of a safe and efficient robot collaboration system (SERoCS) for the next generation co-robots, which consists of robust cognition algorithms for environment monitoring, efficient task planning algorithms for…
Objective: The status of human-robot collaboration for assembly applications is reviewed and key current challenges for the research community and practitioners are presented. Background: As the pandemic of COVID-19 started to surface the manufacturers went under pressure to address demand challenges. Social distancing measures made fewer people available to work. In such situations, robots were pointed at to support humans to address a shortage in supply. An important activity where humans are needed in a manufacturing value chain is assembly. HRC assembly systems are supposed to safeguard co…
Industrial standards define safety requirements for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in industrial manufacturing. The standards particularly require real-time monitoring and securing of the minimum protective distance between a robot and an operator. In this work, we propose a depth-sensor based model for workspace monitoring and an interactive Augmented Reality (AR) User Interface (UI) for safe HRC. The AR UI is implemented on two different hardware: a projector-mirror setup anda wearable AR gear (HoloLens). We experiment the workspace model and UIs for a realistic diesel motor assembly task. …
Stochastic Decision-Making Framework for Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Applications
Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM)（控制与仪器工程系，国王法赫德石油与矿物大学）；Interdisciplinary Research Center for Intelligent Manufacturing & Robotics, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM)（智能制造与机器人交叉研究中心，国王法赫德石油与矿物大学）
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
In hybrid industrial environments, workers' comfort and positive perception of safety are essential requirements for successful acceptance and usage of collaborative robots. This paper proposes a novel human-robot interaction framework in which the robot behaviour is adapted online according to the operator's cognitive workload and stress. The method exploits the generation of B-spline trajectories in the joint space and formulation of a multi-objective optimisation problem to online adjust the total execution time and smoothness of the robot trajectories. The former ensures human efficiency a…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Volvo Group Trucks Operations（沃尔沃集团卡车运营公司）
Collaborative robots are becoming part of intelligent automation systems in modern industry. Development and control of such systems differs from traditional automation methods and consequently leads to new challenges. Thankfully, Robot Operating System (ROS) provides a communication platform and a vast variety of tools and utilities that can aid that development. However, it is hard to use ROS in large-scale automation systems due to communication issues in a distributed setup, hence the development of ROS2. In this paper, a ROS2 based communication architecture is presented together with an …
ABB Corporate Research（ABB企业研究院）；KTH - Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；ABB Robotics（ABB机器人）
In modern industrial collaborative robotic applications, it is desirable to create robot programs automatically, intuitively, and time-efficiently. Moreover, robots need to be controlled by reactive policies to face the unpredictability of the environment they operate in. In this paper we propose a framework that combines a method that learns Behavior Trees (BTs) from demonstration with a method that evolves them with Genetic Programming (GP) for collaborative robotic applications. The main contribution of this paper is to show that by combining the two learning methods we obtain a method that…
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence（奥地利人工智能研究所）；Joanneum Research（乔安娜姆研究院）；Johannes Kepler University（约翰内斯·开普勒大学）
With increased applications of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial workplaces, behavioural effects of human-cobot interactions need to be further investigated. This is of particular importance as nonverbal behaviours of collaboration partners in human-robot teams significantly influence the experience of the human interaction partners and the success of the collaborative task. During the Ars Electronica 2020 Festival for Art, Technology and Society (Linz, Austria), we invited visitors to exploratively interact with an industrial robot, exhibiting restricted interaction capabilities: ex…
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
Industries such as flexible manufacturing and home care will be transformed by the presence of robotic assistants. Assurance of safety and functional soundness for these robotic systems will require rigorous verification and validation. We propose testing in simulation using Coverage-Driven Verification (CDV) to guide the testing process in an automatic and systematic way. We use a two-tiered test generation approach, where abstract test sequences are computed first and then concretized (e.g., data and variables are instantiated), to reduce the complexity of the test generation problem. To dem…
For collaborative robots to become useful, end users who are not robotics experts must be able to instruct them to perform a variety of tasks. With this goal in mind, we developed a system for end-user creation of robust task plans with a broad range of capabilities. CoSTAR: the Collaborative System for Task Automation and Recognition is our winning entry in the 2016 KUKA Innovation Award competition at the Hannover Messe trade show, which this year focused on Flexible Manufacturing. CoSTAR is unique in how it creates natural abstractions that use perception to represent the world in a way use…
Collaborative robots offer increased interaction capabilities at relatively low cost but in contrast to their industrial counterparts they inevitably lack precision. Moreover, in addition to the robots' own imperfect models, day-to-day operations entail various sources of errors that despite being small rapidly accumulate. This happens as tasks change and robots are re-programmed, often requiring time-consuming calibrations. These aspects strongly limit the application of collaborative robots in tasks demanding high precision (e.g. watch-making). We address this problem by relying on a dual-ar…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
Human-robot collaborative assembly systems enhance the efficiency and productivity of the workplace but may increase the workers' cognitive demand. This paper proposes an online and quantitative framework to assess the cognitive workload induced by the interaction with a co-worker, either a human operator or an industrial collaborative robot with different control strategies. The approach monitors the operator's attention distribution and upper-body kinematics benefiting from the input images of a low-cost stereo camera and cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms (i.e. head pose estima…
University of Agder (UiA)（阿格德大学）；University of York（约克大学）；Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)（挪威生命科学大学）；ABB Robotics（ABB机器人公司）
As a general trend in industrial robotics, an increasing number of safety functions are being developed or re-engineered to be handled in software rather than by physical hardware such as safety relays or interlock circuits. This trend reinforces the importance of supplementing traditional, input-based testing and quality procedures which are widely used in industry today, with formal verification and model-checking methods. To this end, this paper focuses on a representative safety-critical system in an ABB industrial paint robot, namely the High-Voltage electrostatic Control system (HVC). Th…
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；University of Verona（维罗纳大学）
Pushing back the frontiers of collaborative robots in industrial environments, we propose a new Separable-Sparse Graph Convolutional Network (SeS-GCN) for pose forecasting. For the first time, SeS-GCN bottlenecks the interaction of the spatial, temporal and channel-wise dimensions in GCNs, and it learns sparse adjacency matrices by a teacher-student framework. Compared to the state-of-the-art, it only uses 1.72% of the parameters and it is ~4 times faster, while still performing comparably in forecasting accuracy on Human3.6M at 1 second in the future, which enables cobots to be aware of human…
Digital Twin technology is playing a pivotal role in the modern industrial evolution. Especially, with the technological progress in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and the increasing trend in autonomy, multi-sensor equipped robotics can create practical digital twin, which is particularly useful in the industrial applications for operations, maintenance and safety. Herein, we demonstrate a real-world digital twin of a safety-critical robotics applications with a Franka-Emika-Panda robotic arm. We develop and showcase an edge-assisted collaborative digital twin for dynamic obstacle avoidance whic…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Significant progress in robotics reveals new opportunities to advance manufacturing. Next-generation industrial automation will require both integration of distinct robotic technologies and their application to challenging industrial environments. This paper presents lessons from a collaborative assembly project between three academic research groups and an industry partner. The goal of the project is to develop a flexible, safe, and productive manufacturing cell for sub-centimeter precision assembly. Solving this problem in a high-mix, low-volume production line motivates multiple research th…
IndEgo: A Dataset of Industrial Scenarios and Collaborative Work for Egocentric Assistants
Fraunhofer IPK（弗劳恩霍夫研究所）；Technical University of Berlin（柏林技术大学）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence（奥地利人工智能研究所）；Johannes Kepler University（约翰·开普勒大学）；Polycular e.U.
In human-robot collaborative interaction scenarios, nonverbal communication plays an important role. Both, signals sent by a human collaborator need to be identified and interpreted by the robotic system, and the signals sent by the robot need to be identified and interpreted by the human. In this paper, we focus on the latter. We implemented on an industrial robot in a VR environment nonverbal behavior signalling the user that it is now their turn to proceed with a pick-and-place task. The signals were presented in four different test conditions: no signal, robot arm gesture, light signal, co…
RoCo Challenge at AAAI 2026: Benchmarking Robotic Collaborative Manipulation for Assembly Towards Industrial Automation
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（南洋理工大学，新加坡）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China（北京邮电大学，北京，中国）；Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA（卡内基梅隆大学，匹兹堡，美国）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore（科技研究局（A*STAR），新加坡）
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Specifying complex task behaviours while ensuring good robot performance may be difficult for untrained users. We study a framework for users to specify rules for acceptable behaviour in a shared environment such as industrial facilities. As non-expert users might have little intuition about how their specification impacts the robot's performance, we design a learning system that interacts with the user to find an optimal solution. Using active preference learning, we iteratively show alternative paths that the robot could take on an interface. From the user feedback ranking the alternatives, …
Evolution of Safety Requirements in Industrial Robotics: Comparative Analysis of ISO 10218-1/2 (2011 vs. 2025) and Integration of ISO/TS 15066
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, VSB—Technical University of Ostrava（机械工程学院，奥斯特拉瓦技术大学）；Faculty of Safety Engineering, VSB—Technical University of Ostrava（安全工程学院，奥斯特拉瓦技术大学）
本文通过比较 ISO 10218:2011 与 ISO 10218:2025 标准，分析工业机器人安全要求在功能安全、网络安全、机器人分类及协作应用等方面的演进，并整合 ISO/TS 15066，建立现代机器人系统设计与运行的全面框架。
Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Desay SV Automotive（德赛西威汽车电子）
Motivated by the tremendous progress we witnessed in recent years, this paper presents a survey of the scientific literature on the topic of Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (C-SLAM), also known as multi-robot SLAM. With fleets of self-driving cars on the horizon and the rise of multi-robot systems in industrial applications, we believe that Collaborative SLAM will soon become a cornerstone of future robotic applications. In this survey, we introduce the basic concepts of C-SLAM and present a thorough literature review. We also outline the major challenges and limitations of…
Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is a mature technology that contested other wireless technologies in the advent of the IoT but did not achieve the same levels of widespread adoption. In recent years, however, with its potential as a wireless ranging and localization solution, it has regained momentum. Within the robotics field, UWB positioning systems are being increasingly adopted for localizing autonomous ground or aerial robots. In the Industrial IoT (IIoT) domain, its potential for ad-hoc networking and simultaneous positioning is also being explored. This survey overviews the state-of-the…
CoBT: Collaborative Programming of Behaviour Trees from One Demonstration for Robot Manipulation
Technological University Dublin（都柏林理工大学）；Irish Manufacturing Research（爱尔兰制造研究院）；Atlantic Technological University（大西洋理工大学）；University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）；Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一大学）；ADAPT Research Centre（ADAPT研究中心）
This paper presents a physical interface for collaborative mobile manipulators in industrial manufacturing and logistics applications. The proposed work builds on our earlier MOCA-MAN interface, through which an operator could be physically coupled to a mobile manipulator to be assisted in performing daily activities. The previous interface was based on a magnetic clamp attached to one arm of the user for the coupling stage, and a bracelet based on EMG sensors on the other arm for human-robot communication via gestures. The new interface instead presents the following additions: i) An industri…
