Intelligent assist systems for flexible assembly

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.