Collaboration-Gap: A bus-modular architecture for human-robot-collaboration systems in production environments

Abstract:
Due to the extensive changes along with Industry 4.0 many established barriers drop. One of those barriers which increasingly disappears separates the workspace between human beings and robots and thus prevents a versatile collaborating environment. This change has led to the development of a wide field of research focusing on the prevention of human-robot impacts and/or the minimization of related risks. This paper is focused on safety regulations introduced as a consequence of those developments over the last ten years and particularly on an approach for demonstrating the unintended gap arising between human and robot due to those regulations. Modularity and integrability as two of the key characteristics in the concept of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS), serve as the comparative parameters.