Human-robot cohabitation in industry

The development of industrial robots has greatly advanced over the last 20 years, with the focus on human-robot collaboration, mobility and, especially, the effectiveness of automation. Indeed, recent robotic technologies are capable of an advanced level of manipulation tasks, learning skills, and protecting their user so that they can be used as robotic coworkers (tactile robots or tactile cobots). Developing software for these novel tactile cobots is very different from the time-consuming approaches of earlier systems. Our chapter first addresses the software engineering of distributed industrial cobotic applications with Human-in-the-Loop (human-robotic co-habitation), targeting distributed architectures of cobotic cells with several, also remote cobots. Then, we discuss the development of tactile robotic platforms suitable for collaborative scenarios with novel anthropomorphic robotic hand-arm systems, for which very intuitive and efficient programming schemes, such as fully immersive remote control can be employed, where a human user directly guides the tactile robot and teaches the intended motions and skills. Finally, we present the high-level synthesis of efficient low-power cobotic hardware-software components with real-time capabilities. Specifically, we consider remote manipulation and tactile sensing applications for novel industrial use cases. As a full vision, we discuss robotic telepresence (robotic immersion) with avatar stations, a technique enabling remote workers to interact with the cobotic cell via an avatar.