A Formal Control Architecture for Collaborative Robotics Applications

In this paper will be presented Comau, a world leader in industrial automation and robotics, that is currently developing its strategy for Industry 4.0, called HUMANufacturing. This strategy covers also collaborative robotics that is one of the main topic of the fourth industrial revolution.

With the advent of the Industry 4.0 era, the application of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial fields has greatly increased. Intelligent collaborative robots or smart cobots enable high flexibility by combining the human ability to adapt to new tasks with automated robots (precision, repeatability) performance. This paper will analyze the current application status and usage of collaborative robots in the various industrial fields, and its benefits and disadvantages from the discussion. Firstly, this paper the defines collaborative robots and explains the difference between cobots and traditional industrial robots. Then, it analyzes the specific application cases of collaborative robots in automotive manufacturing, electronics and electrical appliances, food and beverage, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Subsequently, this paper introduces the main technologies linked to collaborative robots, including sensors, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), machine learning and safety technologies. Through the study of actual application cases, this paper summarizes the significant advantages of collaborative robots to improve productivity, reduce costs, and optimize the working environment. Meanwhile, this paper also discusses the current technical challenges, regulatory and standard issues as well as marketing difficulties for collaborative robots, and looks at future development trends and research directions. The results demonstrate that the utilization of collaborative robots in industry has a promising future and research and practical significance as well

International audience

Collaborative robots (Cobots) are a new significant technology of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and can function together with humans in an uncaged environment to showcase a better performance in safety and productivity. Vietnam, as one of the top four Asian countries for garment manufacturing, has taken a massive portion of labor and faced enormous challenges and opportunities in the I4.0. This study aimed to understand and predict garment employees' behavioral intention toward Cobot implementations in Vietnam based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. Using an online survey, the data were collected from a sample of 198 garment employees in Vietnam recruited through a snowball sampling approach. The findings shed some light on academia in understanding influential factors shaping garment employees' intentions towards Cobots adoption and professionals in building up manufacturing strategies utilizing the advantages of Cobots to meet business expectations in the context of garment manufacturing.

In response to the development of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), the last few decades witnessed a tremendous increase in innovative applications in the fashion industry. Among all, collaborative robots (Cobots) are a new robot model of I4.0 technology, which can function together with workers without fencing to improve safety and productivity in the manufacturing sectors (Perez et al., 2019). However, the current research's Cobots in garment factories have been limited (Lee et al., 2021). Therefore, this study aimed to understand and predict garment employees' behavioral intention towards the Cobot's implementations. Based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) (Venkatesh et al., 2003) and the modified UTAUT model of Boer & Astrom (2017), the relationship between performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, trust, anxiety, personal innovativeness, and behavioral intentions associated with Cobots were examined. The proposed model in this study was used to explore the acceptance level of Cobot applications based on employees' perspectives in Vietnamese garment factories. Data were collected via Qualtrics survey from a sample of garment employees working in garment factories in Vietnam. They were recruited to the study using a snowball sampling approach based on the network of the researcher's previous working experience in Vietnam. Out of the 286 participants who were invited to participate in the survey, 275 responded with a response rate of 96.2%. Of which 198 complete responses were deemed usable for further analysis. Two phases of data analysis were conducted: preliminary study and acceptance model testing. First, a preliminary study is a qualitative analysis by labeling each answer's keywords and systematically categorizing based on those keywords to determine the tasks Cobots could do in the garment factory's process. Second, the acceptance model testing consisted of descriptive analysis, principal components analysis, internal reliability assessment using Cronbach's alpha coefficients, correlation analysis, test for normality using Q-Q scatterplots, and simple regression. Those analyses were conducted in SPSS version 28.0. The findings of the study confirmed elements of the original UTAUT model of Venkatesh et al. (2003). Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions positively affected the garment employees' intention towards the Cobots' implementation. Besides, trust in Cobots, anxiety, and personal innovativeness were inspired by Boer & Astrom (2017) and crucial factors in predicting the garment employees' willingness to collaborate with Cobots in the near future. Trust to Cobots also had a positive impact on the respondents' intention. Personal innovativeness was

Granular jamming grippers are a versatile and adaptable alternative for object manipulation in soft robotics (Amend et al., 2012; Brown et al., 2010; Shintake et al., 2018). Their operating principle is based on taking advantage of the variable stiffness of granular material when a vacuum is applied. This technology allows for adapting to complex geometries without the need for sensors or active control, making it especially useful for fragile or irregularly shaped objects (Delaney & Cleary, 2010). While progress has been made in topics such as the influence of grains on gripper performance, the influence of membranes, applications with fluids other than water, and collaborative robotics applications, the precise nature of contacts between the granular material and the target body during the grasping process remains unclear due to low visibility. Using discrete element method (DEM) simulations, an ovoid gripper containing the granular material is assembled, the interaction with the target body is simulated, and a vacuum is applied to achieve granular jamming (Dierks et al., 2025). This work aims to present an analysis of surface affectation on the target body, as well as its relationship with the granular material used in the gripper, modeling the target bodies with computer aided design (CAD) tools and simulating the interactions of the particles with discrete element method (DEM) it is evidenced that the contacts are concentrated in specific areas of the target body, depending on its geometry, and evolve as the gripper performs vertical displacement on the object, manifesting behaviors such as local interlocks and non-contact zones that change the total contact area and vary the grip force. These findings mark an improvement path for future designs of granular jamming grippers, as well as the integration of DEM simulations in early stages of adaptive manipulation device development.

Cognitive Human Modeling in Collaborative Robotics

The topic of historical units of measurement, as well as geometric and proportional relationships in architecture, has not yet been systematically addressed in historiography or in cultural heritage restoration, neither in Slovakia nor in the wider European context. Although historical units and proportional principles played a fundamental role in architectural design, they are still not consistently integrated into the current methodology of research and restoration of historical buildings. This paper argues that deeper knowledge of these topics has the potential to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of authorial creative practices, architectural form and design principles of historical buildings. The paper presents a brief historical overview of historical units of length, their application in architecture and reflections on their use in architectural practice. This is complemented by an exploration of their current relevance for research in the field of architectural history and heritage conservation. Special attention is devoted to selected case studies from Slovakia – a territory shaped by European influences – illustrating the importance of historical principles of scale and proportion in architectural design. The first case study analyses a Neoclassicist manor house in Blatnica, in which proportional schemes based on classical principles were identified. The second case study focuses on selected works by Michal Milan Harminc (1869–1964), an exceptional architect from the Central European region, whose works oscillate between historicism, modernism and functionalism across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states: Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia. His relationship to historical architecture, its proportions and scale is evident in his designs and renovations of buildings of various typologies, including religious architecture and cultural buildings with national content. His knowledge of historical measurement systems is applied to the reconstruction of the Church of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary in the village of Rabča in the Orava region. The functionalist reconstruction of the church from the 1930s was based on the original architecture of the Baroque church. It took place after the Metre Convention, which introduced the metre as the only official unit of measurement. Although Harminc no longer used historical units when designing the reconstruction, he incorporated the geometric and proportional principles of Baroque aesthetics into his design. The final case study analyses three of Harminc's buildings for the Slovak National Museum, which reflect classical design principles. These buildings exhibit an evolution – from the subsiding neoclassical language in Martin, through the distinctive formation of official monumentality in Bratislava, to the definitive adoption of rational functionalist forms once again in Martin. The paper underscores the need for further research into historical units and proportions as a prerequisite for the future development of more sophisticated methodological approaches in the study and restoration of historical buildings. It also highlights the importance of this knowledge for preserving architectural authenticity and deepening our understanding of its historical context in the regional setting. Finally, it offers new insights into the background of the work of architect and builder M. M. Harminc, an important personality for the wider European territory.

The rapid development of robot technology has introduced a substantial impact on manufacturing. Numerous studies have been carried out to apply collaborative robots (cobots) to address manufacturing productivity and ergonomics issues, which has brought extensive opportunities. In this context, a systematic literature search in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases was carried out by electronic and manual search. Thus, 59 relevant contributions out of 4488 studies were analyzed by using preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA). To provide an overview of the different results, studies are summarized according to the following criteria: country, author, year, study design, robot category, results, and future opportunities. The effects of cobots on safety, system design, workplace design, task scheduling, productivity, and ergonomics are discussed to provide a better understanding of the application of cobots in manufacturing. To incentive future research, this paper reviews the development of cobots in manufacturing and discusses future opportunities and directions from cobots and manufacturing system perspectives. This paper provides novel and valuable insights into cobots application and illustrates potential developments of future human-cobot interaction.

A crucial problem in human-robot collaboration is to achieve seamless coordination among the agents. Robots have to adapt to human behaviour, which is highly uncertain. In fact, humans can perform each task in many ways and with different speeds, occasional errors and short pauses. This paper offers a robust method to monitor the advancement of the current human activity in real-time in order to predict its duration. The algorithm learns online templates of new variants of the task and uses them as references for a Dynamic Time Warping-based algorithm. The proposed strategy has been tested within a realistic assembly task. Results show its ability to give accurate predictions also in case of peculiar variants, such as those associated with errors.

Adaptation middleware is becoming widely used to build adaptive collaborative applications. However, collaborative applications requiring real-time services are intolerant of the long reconfiguration time of the existing adaptation middleware, which is in a range of seconds or even tens of seconds. In this paper, we present MARCHES, which is active message oriented adaptation middleware that reduces the reconfiguration time. Different from the traditional middleware that supports the single component-chain based application architecture, MARCHES maintains multiple component chains or actuators. Then the process of architecture reconfiguration is done by a new method of switching active and inactive actuators, which replaces the traditional method of modifying the single-chain architecture. An active message based synchronization protocol is proposed according to the new method to reduce the communication overhead and reconfiguration time. Experiment results demonstrate that MARCHES improves the packet delivery ratio and throughput of collaborative applications. Results also show that the reconfiguration time achieved by MARCHES is in a range of hundreds of microseconds and the extra costs introduced by the multi-actuator architecture are extremely low.

3D terrains used in digital animations and videogames are typically created by several collaborators with a single-user application, which constrains them to update the shared terrain from their PCs, using a turn-taking strategy. Moreover, collaborators have to visualize the terrain through 2D views, confusing novice users when conceiving its shape in 3D. In this article, we describe an architecture for collaborative applications, which allow co-located users to sketch a terrain using their mobile devices concurrently. Two interaction modes are supplied: the standard one and an augmented reality-based mode, which helps collaborators understand the 3D terrain shape. Using the painting with brushesparadigm, users can modify the terrain while visualizing its shape evolution through the camera of their devices. Work coordination is promoted by enriching the 3D space with each collaborator’s avatar, which provides awareness information about identity, location, and current action. We implemented a collaborative application from this architecture that was tested by groups of users, who assessed its hedonic and pragmatic qualities in both interaction modes and compared them with the qualities of a similar Web terrain editor. The results showed that the augmented reality mode of our prototype was considered more attractive and usable by the participants.

In the past few years, cloud computing has become an integral technology both for the day to day running of corporations, as well as in everyday life as more services are offered which use a backend cloud. At the same time online collaboration tools are becoming more important as both businesses and individuals need to share information and collaborate with other entities. Previous work has presented an architecture for a collaboration online application which allows users in different locations to share videos, images and documents while at the same time video chatting. The application's servers are deployed in a cloud environment which can scale up and down based on demand. Furthermore, the design allows the application to be deployed on multiple clouds which are deployed in different geographic locations. Previous work however did not introduce how the application's up and down scaling is to be achieved. In this paper the autonomic system which manages the self-optimizing function of the cloud is presented. The autonomic system itself is a self-organizing system with a control model based on the leaky-bucket theory often used in network congestion control. A testbed for the collaboration application is used in order to gather performance metrics for the model.

Remote video applications over the internet have been a trend for the last few years. As they grew in popularity, several areas of knowledge have started to take advantage of their functionalities and the possibility to make collaborative environments using video arose. From videoconferences to educational telemedicine video streamings, these collaborative applications are usually hard and tedious to configure and deploy and usually limit the number of participants. This work proposes a scalable architecture for collaborative video applications that makes the development and deployment of collaborative video applications easier and supports a high number of users simultaneously producing and consuming video in these applications.

In analogy to civil engineering, the load-bearing of a software system bear significant importance for software evolution. Unfortunately, documentation and evolution of such walls in the form of software architecture has proven to be problematic, because instead of individual classes and objects, the important artifacts may be collections of design elements and their relations, whose collective evolution should be considered. In this paper, we introduce a tool where architecturally significant concepts, defined in the form of patterns, can be separated from application specific details. This separation allows diverging evolution of applications and patterns forming their architecture, with an option to enforce the architecture in applications. Moreover, the tool helps in correcting the designs in case an error has been made or patterns forming the architecture have been upgraded.