Vision vs. Reality of Human-Robot Collaboration | #sciencefather #researchawards #phenomenology #SmartManufacturing #CollaborativeRobots

A Dynamic Model for Navigating Socio-Technical Tensions

Industry 5.0: Human-Centric and Sustainable Manufacturing

Industry 5.0 represents a paradigm shift toward integrating advanced automation with human expertise and sustainable practices. It emphasizes not only efficiency but also resilience, environmental responsibility, and well-being in industrial processes.


Cobots 101: Features and Applications

Collaborative robots—cobots—are designed for shared workspaces, featuring sensors, compliant mechanisms, and safety-first engineering. They excel in repetitive or precise tasks and are increasingly used alongside humans, from assembly to quality inspection.

Safe-by-Design vs Safe-in-Practice

While standards like ISO/TS 15066 and ISO 10218 mandate features such as force limits and tactile detection, real-world workflows reveal additional safety challenges. For instance, dynamic human behaviors, informal workspace layouts, and evolving tasks can all create hidden hazards that go beyond design compliance.

Beyond Labels: Achieving Real Collaboration

Simply placing a cobot near a human worker doesn’t guarantee collaboration. True human-robot synergy requires cognitive coordination, shared understanding of the task, adaptive behavior, and mutual awareness—factors that are often overlooked in early deployments.

Technical Hurdles in Cobotic Systems

To collaborate seamlessly, cobots need reliable perception (e.g., vision systems), responsive control loops, context-awareness, and even rudimentary reasoning. Achieving these levels of intelligence—especially in unpredictable, cluttered manufacturing spaces—remains a considerable engineering challenge.

Managerial Dilemmas: ROI, Ethics, and Strategy

Leaders struggle with calculating return on investment for cobots, particularly when balancing productivity gains with social and environmental goals. Ethical dilemmas arise around job redesign, skills development, and ethical sourcing, often without clear business frameworks to guide decisions.

Reimagining Work Roles and Skills

Cobots shift the nature of shop-floor roles, nudging humans from manual labor toward oversight, maintenance, or decision-making. Managing this shift involves upskilling initiatives, rethinking hierarchies, and ensuring that human agency remains central.

Implications & Future Directions

  • Academic: Enriches Paradox Theory within socio-technical systems, highlighting the role of both “either–or” and “both–and” strategies.

  • Practice: Offers decision-makers guidance on work design, training, ethical AI, and organizational change.

  • Policy: Emphasizes the need for regulatory frameworks that protect workers and foster trust in collaborative systems.

Conclusion 

  • Reframing human-robot collaboration as a complex, evolving process

  • Research opportunities in trust, ethics, and worker empowerment

  • Recommendations for industry, researchers, and policymakers

#Industry5_0  #SmartManufacturing  #CollaborativeRobots  #Cobots  #HumanRobotInteraction  #AdvancedManufacturing  #FactoryOfTheFuture  #AutomationAndRobotics

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