Assessment of operator stress induced by robot collaboration in assembly

To improve productivity of assembly in cell production, a robot is introduced to help operators physically. A moving robot around a human operator however induces much stress on human operators because they need to work coexistently and compellingly with the robot. This paper deals with the strain measurement caused by industrial robots, and the discuss design criterions of robot collaboration with a human operator. Several basic strains are experimentally measured: distance from a swinging robot to an operator, speed at robot's movement towards an operator and so on. The results are applied in a novel cell production assembly system. (C) 2010 CIRP.