Functional Integration of a Robotics Software Framework into a Human Simulation System

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) in assembly aims to combine the special skills of human workers and robots in order to increase productivity in flexible assembly processes and reduce the physical strain on human workers. The high degree of cooperation goes hand in hand with the fact that the costs of introducing an HRC workplace are relatively high and HRC has so far been difficult to implement in ongoing productions. A major reason for this is the lack of planning and simulation software for the HRC. Therefore, this paper presents the integration of simulation functionalities for robotic components into an existing proprietary software for manual work activities. It leads to an overall simulation tool for the design of collaborative assembly systems. One motivation for this development is to get a realistic simulation of HRC with a collision-free trajectory planning which provides reliable information on the cycle time, layout optimization and safety analysis already during planning and well before the actual commissioning of the HRC application.