Human–robot collaboration is currently one of the frontiers of industrial robot implementation. In parallel, the use of robots and robotic devices is increasing in several fields, substituting humans in “4D”—dull, dirty, dangerous, and delicate—tasks, and such a trend is boosted by the recent need for social distancing. New challenges in safety assessment and verification arise, due to both the closer and closer human–robot interaction, common for the different application domains, and the broadening of user audience, which is now very diverse. The present paper discusses a cross-domain approach towards the definition of step-by-step validation procedures for collaborative robotic applications. To outline the context, the standardization framework is analyzed, especially from the perspective of safety testing and assessment. Afterwards, some testing procedures based on safety skills, developed within the framework of the European project COVR, are discussed and exemplary presented.

Automated disassembly is increasingly in focus for Recycling, Re-use, and Remanufacturing (Re-X) activities. Trends in digitalization, in particular digital twin (DT) technologies and the digital product passport, as well as recently proposed European legislation such as the Net Zero and the Critical materials Acts will accelerate digitalization of product documentation and factory processes. In this contribution we look beyond these activities by discussing digital information for stakeholders at the Re-X segment of the value-chain. Furthermore, we present an approach to automated product disassembly based on different levels of available product information. The challenges for automated disassembly and the subsequent requirements on modeling of disassembly processes and product states for electronic waste are examined. The authors use a top-down (e.g., review of existing standards and process definitions) methodology to define an initial data model for disassembly processes. An additional bottom-up approach, whereby 5 exemplary electronics products were manually disassembled, was employed to analyze the efficacy of the initial data model and to offer improvements. This paper reports on our suggested informal data models for automatic electronics disassembly and the associated robotic skills.

Human–robot collaboration (HRC) is one of the key aspects of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and requires intuitive modalities for humans to communicate seamlessly with robots, such as speech, touch, or bodily gestures. However, utilizing these modalities is usually not enough to ensure a good user experience and a consideration of the human factors. Therefore, this paper presents a software component, Multi-Modal Offline and Online Programming (M2O2P), which considers such characteristics and establishes a communication channel with a robot with predefined yet configurable hand gestures. The solution was evaluated within a smart factory use case in the Smart Human Oriented Platform for Connected Factories (SHOP4CF) EU project. The evaluation focused on the effects of the gesture personalization on the perceived workload of the users using NASA-TLX and the usability of the component. The results of the study showed that the personalization of the gestures reduced the physical and mental workload and was preferred by the participants, while overall the workload of the tasks did not significantly differ. Furthermore, the high system usability scale (SUS) score of the application, with a mean of 79.25, indicates the overall usability of the component. Additionally, the gesture recognition accuracy of M2O2P was measured as 99.05%, which is similar to the results of state-of-the-art applications.

The use of collaborative robots in the industrial domain has significantly grown in the last years, allowing humans to operate in the same workspace occupied by robots without any physical barriers. Understandably, the safety of the human operator has been a major concern both for researchers and regulatory bodies. The power and force limited modality of robots is of particular interest in that sense, being used in order to bound the energy of eventual collisions when a close physical interaction with humans is necessary. Such an interaction modality allows the robotic system to operate without the use of barriers, but a measurement of the force and pressure occurring due to a contact must be provided as part of the risk assessment. However, the precise procedure to follow in order to reliably provide such measures is still unclear for users and system integrators willing to self-assess the safety of their own collaborative robotic system. In this work, the repeatability and reliability of such testing procedures and measures are analyzed with an interlaboratory comparison approach, with the aim to establish the degree of variability possibly encountered when performing the same test under slightly different conditions.