This paper provides an overview of collaborative robotics towards manufacturing applications. Over the last decade, the market has seen the introduction of a new category of robots—collaborative robots (or “cobots”)—designed to physically interact with humans in a shared environment, without the typical barriers or protective cages used in traditional robotics systems. Their potential is undisputed, especially regarding their flexible ability to make simple, quick, and cheap layout changes; however, it is necessary to have adequate knowledge of their correct uses and characteristics to obtain the advantages of this form of robotics, which can be a barrier for industry uptake. The paper starts with an introduction of human–robot collaboration, presenting the related standards and modes of operation. An extensive literature review of works published in this area is undertaken, with particular attention to the main industrial cases of application. The paper concludes with an analysis of the future trends in human–robot collaboration as determined by the authors.

Collaborative robots are increasingly common in modern production systems, since they allow to merge the productivity of automated systems with the flexibility and dexterity of manual ones. The direct interaction between the human and the robot can be the greatest advantage and the greatest limit of collaborative systems at the same time, depending on how it affects human factors like ergonomics and mental stress. This work presents an overview of collaborative robotics considering three main dimensions: robot features, modern production systems characteristics and human factors. A literature review on how such dimensions interact is addressed and a discussion on the current state of the art is presented, showing the topics that have been already widely explored and the research gaps that should be fulfilled in the future.

New technologies, such as collaborative robots, are an option to improve productivity and flexibility in assembly systems. Task allocation is fundamental to properly assign the available resources. However, safety is usually not considered in the task allocation for assembly systems, even if it is fundamental to ensure the safety of human operator when he/she is working with the cobot. Hence, a model that considers safety as a constraint is here presented, with the aim to both maximize the productivity in a collaborative workcell and to promote a secure human robot collaboration. Indexes that consider both process and product characteristics are considered to evaluate the quality of the proposed model, which is also compared with one without the safety constraint. The results confirm the validity and necessity of the newly proposed method, which ensures the safety of the operator while improving the performance of the system.