Human-in-the-Loop Robotic Manipulation Planning for Collaborative Assembly

This article develops a robotic manipulation planner for human-robot collaborative assembly. Unlike previous methods that study an independent and fully artificial intelligent (AI)-equipped autonomous system, this article explores the subtask distribution between a robot and a human and studies a human-in-the-loop robotic system for collaborative assembly. The system distributes the subtasks of an assembly to robots and humans by exploiting their advantages and avoiding their disadvantages. The robot in the system will work on pick-and-place tasks and provide workpieces to humans. The human collaborator will work on fine operations, such as aligning, fixing, and screwing. A constraint-based incremental manipulation planning method is proposed to generate the motion for the robots. The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated by asking a human and the dual-arm robot to collaboratively assemble a cabinet. The results show that the proposed system and planner are effective and efficient and can assist humans in finishing the assembly task comfortably.