On the Development of Programming by Demonstration Environment for Human-Robot Collaboration in a Furniture Painting Cell

The advanced manufacturing capabilities such as robot arms, sensors, and software can create a safe, dynamic, and real-time decision-making for a collaborative working environment between humans and robots. The current paper presents a human–robot collaboration system to be applied in a furniture painting cell. The aim is to increase the level of automatization of the painting process and minimize the repetitive operations performed in the conventional manual painting process. The use of autonomous robot arms, programmed by demonstration, will reduce the worker exposure time to chemicals employed in the painting process and minimize the repetitive movements performed during manual painting, which will improve human safety. Current research aims to define a framework where humans and robots can share the working area simultaneously thanks to integrating several systems to control the working environment, the robot arm, and the operation, summarizing current technologies’ main challenges to achieve a symbiotic collaboration painting cell.