A Capability-Aware Role Allocation Approach to Industrial Assembly Tasks

The deployment of industrial robotic cells based on lean manufacturing principles enables the development of fast-reconfigurable assembly lines in which human and robotic agents collaborate to achieve a shared task. To ensure the effective coordination of the shared effort, each task must be decomposed into a sequence of atomic actions that can be assigned either to a single agent or to the combination of more agents, according to a defined metric. While task allocation is a general problem and has been discussed intensively in other fields, less effort has been devoted in industrial scenarios, involving mixed human-robot teams and in particular, to the factors that should be considered in allocating tasks among a heterogeneous set of agents in collaborative manufacturing scenarios. In this letter, we investigate the agent characteristics that should be considered in the task allocation problem of fast-reconfigurable systems in industrial assembly processes. First, we introduce a set of indices, namely task complexity, agent dexterity, and agent effort, to evaluate agent performance with respect to a task. Second, we propose an offline allocation algorithm that combines the performance indices to assign optimally the task to the team agents. Finally, we validate the framework in a proof-of-concept collaborative assembly of a metallic structure. The results show that the workload is shared through the agents according to their particular physical capabilities and skill levels. A subjective analysis of the proposed collaborative framework on 12 healthy participants also validated the intuitiveness-of-use and improved performance.