Application of Realtime Robotics platform to execute unstructured industrial tasks involving industrial robots, cobots, and human operators

Small and medium-sized craft enterprises are still characterized by production process involving human labour to a large extent. The possibility of a safe interaction of the operator in the collaborative working area of the machine, and the development of an easy-to-program robotic cell, would pave the way to the introduction of automation in such an environment. This paper proposes an application of a commercial platform for collision avoidance, based on Dynamic Road-map algorithms, to execute unstructured industrial tasks involving industrial robots, cobots, and human operators at the same time. An example is presented in a pick-and-place and assembling application, in which the components are feed by a conveyor belt with random order and random flow rate. The adopted platform enhances the possibility to exploit in the same robotic cell both industrial robots and human labour, thus allowing a reduction of costs and more precise applications. Moreover, the possibility to calculate at run-time alternative trajectories to avoid obstacles (both human being and other robot in the cell), avoiding to make the robot temporarily inactive, allows to improve the system productivity.