Applying the PROSA reference architecture to enable the interaction between the worker and the industrial robot

Involving an industrial robot in a close physical interaction with the worker became quite possible, as a result of the availability of different collaborative industrial robots in the market. The physical cooperation between the industrial robot and the worker usually done under the umbrella of the flexible manufacturing paradigm, where both the industrial robot and the worker need to change their tasks fast and efficiently, to cope with the changes in the manufacturing process. This means that a reliable manufacturing control system must stand behind this physical interaction to achieve the proper communication interaction. A holonic control architecture is an ideal solution for this problem. Therefore, during this research we study the most commonly applied model of the holonic control architecture, then we apply this architecture on our case study, where one worker cooperates with a dual-arm industrial robot to build and produce any new product. Also the research uses the worker's hand gesture recognition as a method to interact with the industrial robot during the execution of a cooperative production scenario.