Selection of cobot for human-robot collaboration for robotic assembly task with Best Worst MCDM techniques

Since the first industrial robot was produced at the beginning of the 1960s, robotic technology has completely changed the sector. Industrial robots are made for various tasks, including welding, painting, assembling, disassembling, picking and placing printed circuit boards, palletizing, packing and labeling, and product testing. Finding flexible solutions that allow production lines to be swiftly re-planned, adjusted, and structured for new or significantly modified product development remains a significant unresolved problem. Today’s Industrial robots are still mostly pre-programmed to do certain jobs; they cannot recognize mistakes in their work or communicate well with both a complicated environment and a human worker. Full robot autonomy, including organic interaction, learning from and with humans, and safe and adaptable performance for difficult tasks in unstructured contexts, will remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Humans and robots will work together in collaborative settings such as homes, offices, and factory setups to execute various object manipulation activities. So, it is necessary to study the collaborative robots (cobots) that will play a key role in human-robot collaborations. Multiple competing variables must be considered in a thorough selection process to assess how well industrial cobots will work on an industrial working floor. To select a collaborative robot for the human-robot collaborative application, a straightforward multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology is based on the best-worst method (BWM). The ranking derived using the BWM method is displayed. The outcomes demonstrated the value of MCDM techniques for cobot selection.