Design of an industrial human-robot system through participative simulations — Tank cleaning case study

Industrials are starting to deploy interactive robots as new solutions to improve workstations. In particular, workstations where human operators may get injured because of repetitive tasks, bad postures or heavy loads are targeted. The introduction of such interactive systems on industrial workstations brings new challenges concerning human cognitive and physical considerations to factories. We followed an approach involving operators, and ergonomics and cognitive engineering skills to improve the introduction of interactive robots in the industry. In this paper, we present the first application of our work on a pyrotechnic tank cleaning workstation. Our approach is illustrated with the design of a solution through several simulation steps involving the workstation's operators. Finally, the design of a prototype based on a teleoperated robot is introduced.