Future manufacturing paradigms will require flexibility and cognitive
capabilities to respond to the increasing need for mass customisation.
Production environments will be populated by humans and robots. Despite the
advancements in technology, today’s collaborative robots are primarily only
able to safely stop in case of unintended contacts or collisions with humans,
without being able to effectively collaborate with them. This talk will address
the problem of synchronising human and robot activities and proposes a formal
control architecture to govern the execution of collaborative application,
requiring some degree of coordination between the human and the robot, while
guaranteeing safety.