HUMAN–ROBOT COLLABORATION: A SURVEY

TLDR

Robots are transitioning from structured factories to human‑populated settings, requiring advanced cognitive abilities, safe operation, and enhanced cooperation, making human‑robot collaboration a high‑impact interdisciplinary field. This survey reviews the current state of human‑robot collaboration, offering a comprehensive overview of its technologies and methods. It presents established techniques for intention estimation, action planning, joint action, and machine learning, along with hardware design guidelines.

Abstract

As robots are gradually leaving highly structured factory environments and moving into human populated environments, they need to possess more complex cognitive abilities. They do not only have to operate efficiently and safely in natural, populated environments, but also be able to achieve higher levels of cooperation and communication with humans. Human–robot collaboration (HRC) is a research field with a wide range of applications, future scenarios, and potentially a high economic impact. HRC is an interdisciplinary research area comprising classical robotics, cognitive sciences, and psychology. This paper gives a survey of the state of the art of HRC. Established methods for intention estimation, action planning, joint action, and machine learning are presented together with existing guidelines to hardware design. This paper is meant to provide the reader with a good overview of technologies and methods for HRC.