Towards Shared Autonomy for Robotic Tasks in Manufacturing

Recently a new class of industrial robots hit the market that can be potentially used in the same environment as human co-workers (fenceless) if relevant norms are fulfilled. The concept of robots cooperating with humans has gained a lot of interest in the academia, but lacks nowadays applications in both domestic and industrial areas. In this paper, we present a platform for human robot collaboration, which allows building applications of human robot interactions in an intuitive way. Using this platform, the worker is enabled to pursue different levels of shared autonomy between human and robot. Three applications in industrial environment are demonstrated with increasing level of autonomy from coexistence to collaboration. These examples exemplify the usability of such a flexible system in the automation chain and the presented results provide strong evidence of the technological potential in the field.