The growing number of product variants, smaller lot sizes, reduced time to market and shorter lifecycles of products have lead to increasing demands on automation equipment and concepts. As a solution, hybrid human integrated approaches are proposed. The idea is to combine human flexibility, intelligence and skills with the advantages of sophisticated technical systems. Intelligent assist systems (IAS) represent a novel class of assembly systems capable of working with human operators in two modes: workplace sharing and time sharing. This paper presents a novel collaborative robot system ("Cobot") capable of sharing the workspace with the human co-worker and collaborating with him through direct physical contact.
