Proactive human–robot collaboration: Mutual-cognitive, predictable, and self-organising perspectives

TLDR

Human–Robot Collaboration is essential for smart manufacturing, yet current approaches are reactive, human‑ or robot‑dominant, and fail to support complex tasks or reduce operator load, prompting a shift toward a 5C intelligence framework that enables mutual‑cognitive, predictable, and self‑organising proactive collaboration. This paper proposes a vision and research agenda for Proactive HRC, outlining its trend, concept, systematic architecture, and enabling technologies, while highlighting challenges and future directions for real‑world deployment. Proactive HRC is achieved through proactive robot control that allows multiple human and robotic agents to collaboratively perform manufacturing tasks by considering each other's operational needs, desired resources, and complementary capabilities. The authors hope the work will stimulate discussion and offer valuable insights to academics and industry practitioners exploring flexible human‑robot production.

Abstract

Human–Robot Collaboration (HRC) has a pivotal role in smart manufacturing for strict requirements of human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. However, existing HRC development mainly undertakes either a human-dominant or robot-dominant manner, where human and robotic agents reactively perform operations by following pre-defined instructions, thus far from an efficient integration of robotic automation and human cognition. The stiff human–robot relations fail to be qualified for complex manufacturing tasks and cannot ease the physical and psychological load of human operators. In response to these realistic needs, this paper presents our arguments on the obvious trend, concept, systematic architecture, and enabling technologies of Proactive HRC, serving as a prospective vision and research topic for future work in the human-centric smart manufacturing era. Human–robot symbiotic relation is evolving with a 5C intelligence — from Connection, Coordination, Cyber, Cognition to Coevolution, and finally embracing mutual-cognitive, predictable, and self-organising intelligent capabilities, i.e., the Proactive HRC. With proactive robot control, multiple human and robotic agents collaboratively operate manufacturing tasks, considering each others' operation needs, desired resources, and qualified complementary capabilities. This paper also highlights current challenges and future research directions, which deserve more research efforts for real-world applications of Proactive HRC. It is hoped that this work can attract more open discussions and provide useful insights to both academic and industrial practitioners in their exploration of human–robot flexible production.