A Human-Machine Interface for a Handing-Over Robot System of a Supply Parts Production Facility

Abstract

Recently, cell manufacturing systems are being adopted at many factories. In such manufacturing systems, workers are required to retrieve various parts from different places during the assembly process. Therefore, it is expected that more effective manufacturing can be realized using automatic parts supply systems for the workers. One of the effective methods is a handing-over motion done by a robot as a method of automatic parts supply. The handing-over motion of the robot must not only be physically safe, but also psychologically comfortable. In addition, there are individual preferences for the most comfortable handing-over motion. In particular, when a robot hands over parts to a particular worker (cooperator), the motion characteristics of the robot should be the most comfortable for him or her. It is considered that a human-machine interface, via which the cooperator adjusts the motion characteristics of the robot, is necessary. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a human-machine interface which is used to adjust the motion characteristics for a handing-over robot system that supplies parts. Firstly, a prototype handing-over robot system in which the cooperator can adjust the motion characteristics of the robot (maximum velocity, peak of velocity profile and handing position) by a human-machine interface using a speech recognition is developed. Using this robot system, cooperators can realize the most comfortable handing-over motion by adjusting the motion characteristics of the robot. Then the differences between the motion characteristics of unskilled and skilled cooperators are analyzed using the robot system. From the analysis, we propose a human-machine interface giving consideration to the differences. Furthermore, a handing-over robot system that adapts the proposed human-machine interface was developed. The effectiveness of the proposed human-machine interface is demonstrated by evaluation.