Human – Industrial Robot Collaboration: Application of Simulation Software for Workstation Optimisation

The simulation possibilities of Human – Industrial Robot Collaboration (HIRC) are limited in commercial software and published research. In order to meet this a demonstrator software has been developed. This paper presents the combination of the quantitative output from the software (measuring operation time and biomechanical load) together with existing optimisation techniques used to design the optimal HIRC workstation. An industrial case is used as an example where the optimal geometric handover position between robot and human is found. From the simulation software metamodels were created in order to represent the investigated workstation. The model was used in a multi-objective optimisation problem and resulted in a trade-off chart between operation time and biomechanical load. The result shows one example of the possibilities to combine the quantitative results from the simulation with optimisation in order to get the best solution to a HIRC design problem.