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Automation and Robotics have been described as two of the enabling technologies for the Industry 4.0 paradigm, especially the use of autonomous and collaborative robot systems that can work together with humans and other machines. In manual assembly for example, these so-called co-bot systems (that also includes autonomous transportation and specialized machines) can improve the automation level, product quality, as well as human working conditions. However, in order to fully benefit from co-bot systems, many challenges need to be addressed before it can be introduced in complex industries e.g. the truck industry. This paper presents a number of challenges and requirements identified during an industrial use case, where autonomous co-bot systems have been introduced into an existing manual assembly station. These requirements are related to safe and intuitive interactions, smart tools, the need to manage variability as well as the need for highly flexible communication and control. During the use case, a number of initial solutions was developed where the implemented control architecture was based on the framework Robot Operation System (ROS) and Sequence Planner (SP).

During the last five decades, automation and robotics have transformed the automotive industry by increasing efficiency and improving the product quality. However, future trucks that will be autonomous, electrical and connected will require a completely new type of flexibility and intelligence in the production systems, especially in the final assembly. To handle the increased complexity of the products, production processes and logistic systems, final assembly must be transformed into collaborative and intelligent automation systems. These systems will include collaborative and deliberative robots (cobots), advanced vision-based control, adaptive safety systems, online optimization and learning algorithms and connected and well-informed human operators. But it will be a huge undertaking to transform current trucks industry such that they can design, implement and maintain large scale collaborative and intelligent automation systems. This paper presents the challenges with current planning and preparation processes for final assembly as well as the requirement and possible solutions for the future processes. An industrial use case at Volvo Trucks based on Sequence Planner and ROS2 is used to evaluate the proposed planning and preparation processes.

Automation and robotics are two enablers for developing the Smart Factory of the Future, which is based on intelligent machines and collaboration between robots and humans. Especially in final assembly and its material handling, where traditional automation is challenging to use, collaborative robot (cobot) systems may increase the flexibility needed in future production systems. A major obstacle to deploy a truly collaborative application is to design and implement a safe and efficient interaction between humans and robot systems while maintaining industrial requirements such as cost and productivity. Advanced and intelligent control strategies is the enabler when creating this safe, yet efficient, system, but is often hard to design and build.This paper highlights and discusses the challenges in meeting safety requirements according to current safety standards, starting with the mandatory risk assessment and then applying risk reduction measures, when transforming a typical manual final assembly station into an intelligent collaborative station. An important conclusion is that current safety standards and requirements must be updated and improved and the current collaborative modes defined by the standards community should be extended with a new mode, which in this paper is refereed to the deliberative planning and acting mode.

In previous scholarly literature, safety is understood as a main obstacle for introducing human–robot collaboration in industrial production. This interdisciplinary paper is concerned with the safety and regulation of human–robot collaboration and contribute to this debate through a case study of stakeholders in Sweden, exploring the views of the involved stakeholders which is largely absent in previous research literature. The case study concludes that while stressing some potential benefits, stakeholders within the industry are generally reluctant to human–robot collaboration. Current regulation and safety standards are understood to be one of the prominent obstacles to such solutions. Based on the perspectives of the stakeholders as well as an analysis of current regulation and safety standards, the paper identifies the following problems with current regulation: (i) existing categories and conceptualizations used to guide safety evaluation are problematic, (ii) intelligence and autonomous aspects of collaborative systems are not sufficiently addressed, (iii) current standards do not enable evaluation of the trade off between safety, efficiency and flexibility, and (iv) the regulation has a lack of focus on active safety and using the control system as a safety measure.

In an attempt to address these identified problems, the difference between traditional collaborative robots and intelligent human–robot collaboration is analyzed in the paper and a new safety approach is suggested, called Deliberative safety, which allows the humans and robots to switch between different safety measures based on the need for flexibility or efficiency to reach production goals. While considering system performance, we propose a taxonomy to better support the design of deliberative safety as well as five safety measures to use in a deliberative safety approach. These measures include available measures like perimeter safety, zone safety and reactive safety to more advanced measures like planned and active safety, and when used together, they can enable intelligent human–robot collaboration.