Current state of the art of collaborative robotics in industry is the result of a long legacy of research and development in control theory, major effort in actuation and mechanisms design in 2000s resulting in commercial outcomes, and abundant literature about improving control performances and intuitive interaction modes.
Collaborative robotics is an umbrella term that vehicles the general idea of proximity of machines to humans for some useful task, not necessarily continuously/synchronously in a shared spaces. Useful tasks implicate benefits for workload of factory operators (e.g. cognitive and physical ergonomics) or for quality and productivity (e.g. more accessible layouts, troubleshooting, frequent process observation, etc). Current state of the art of collaborative robotics in industry is the result of a long legacy of research and development in control theory, major effort in actuation and mechanisms design in 2000s resulting in commercial outcomes, and abundant literature about improving control performances and intuitive interaction modes. Safety technology and standardization is reported as a coupled subject with respect to machinery design and equipment, since safe collaborative robotics aims at identifying hazards and estimating risks of applications, and reducing such risks by a combination of different strategies and options available for different classes of robot systems.