A Review on Collaborative Robots in Industrial and Service Sectors

Today, a collaborative robotics is a rapidly developing area due to its applications in a broad variety of sectors. Collaborative robots (cobots) are robots, which are designed specifically to work along with humans in a common workspace. This article discusses modern cobots employed in industrial and service sectors. Research activities associated with cobots used in virtual environments and real world experiments are described. The ISO/TS 15066:2016 technical specifications followed by cobots for ensuring safety to human operators are emphasized.

I. Introduction

Recent advances in robotics allowed to increase an integration of robots into multiple areas of a human everyday life including medical services [1], [2], search and rescue operations [3], [4], transportation [5], [6], agriculture [7], [8], warehouse management [9], human-robot interaction (HRI) [10], [11]. Today, manufacturing [12] is the most automated sector of economics, which involves a broad variety of static and mobile manipulators, automated conveyor lines, and other robotized equipment.