Interactive, Collaborative Robots: Challenges and Opportunities

TLDR

Robotic technology has revolutionized manufacturing since the 1960s, yet flexible, error‑detecting, and human‑interactive robots—especially in service settings—remain a major challenge, and full autonomy is still out of reach. The paper aims to discuss the major challenges of developing collaborative robot systems. It illustrates these challenges by presenting examples of the current state of the art.

Abstract

Robotic technology has transformed manufacturing industry ever since the first industrial robot was put in use in the beginning of the 60s. The challenge of developing flexible solutions where production lines can be quickly re-planned, adapted and structured for new or slightly changed products is still an important open problem. Industrial robots today are still largely preprogrammed for their tasks, not able to detect errors in their own performance or to robustly interact with a complex environment and a human worker. The challenges are even more serious when it comes to various types of service robots. Full robot autonomy, including natural interaction, learning from and with human, safe and flexible performance for challenging tasks in unstructured environments will remain out of reach for the foreseeable future. In the envisioned future factory setups, home and office environments, humans and robots will share the same workspace and perform different object manipulation tasks in a collaborative manner. We discuss some of the major challenges of developing such systems and provide examples of the current state of the art.