Applicability of Human-Robot Collaboration to Small Batch Production

In the past years, the use of industrial robots was on the rise. Today, they are used for mass production in large enterprises. On the contrary, deployment of robots in small enterprises is lagging behind. Programming time is usually two orders of magnitude larger than the cycle time, and this fact severely limits applicability of robots in small batch production. This work analyzes opportunities to profitably employ robots also in this case through the adoption of the human-robot collaboration. A collaboration paradigm is proposed, where the tasks are assigned to robotic and human workers based on the batch size, task programming complexity (time), and manual execution time. The validity of this approach is demonstrated in a case study conducted in a collaborative human-robot work cell.