Currently, a large number of industrial robots have been deployed to replace or assist humans to perform various repetitive and dangerous manufacturing tasks. However, based on current technological capabilities, such robotics field is rapidly evolving so that humans are not only sharing the same workspace with robots, but also are using robots as useful assistants. Consequently, due to this new type of emerging robotic systems, industrial collaborative robots or cobots, human and robot co-workers have been able to work side-by-side as collaborators to accomplish tasks in industrial environments. Therefore, new human–robot interaction systems have been developed for such systems to be able to utilize the capabilities of both humans and robots. Accordingly, this article presents a literature review of major recent works on human–robot interactions in industrial collaborative robots, conducted during the last decade (between 2008 and 2017). Additionally, the article proposes a tentative classification of the content of these works into several categories and sub-categories. Finally, this paper addresses some challenges of industrial collaborative robotics and explores future research issues.

The paper presents a new approach for robots tasks allocation and scheduling in order to minimize the total execution time (makespan) of a mission while satisfying all the tasks constraints. This approach is implemented in a multi-agent architecture for remote control of heterogeneous multi-robot systems. The agents controlling the robots coordinate their actions and cooperate to achieve the assigned mission. The proposed approach is carried out in two phases. During the first phase, a negotiation process (based on the Contract-net protocol) is carried out between the agents of the system to allocate the tasks to the robot proposing the minimal execution time (cost). In the second phase, a local scheduling process based on priority rules is carried out by the corresponding agent for each allocated task in order to minimize its inoccupation (idle) time.

The growing interest in robotics has originated, in these recent years, the development of a high variety of intelligent and autonomous robots, and a great number of software frameworks for robotics. This paper surveys some representative of the existing of these development frameworks. In addition, it describes and compares their principal features and limitations. The paper provides also information on some of the existing robots supported by the studied frameworks all over the world. Finally, the paper discusses the main requirements that a robotics framework must satisfy while being easy to understand and to use.