| Summary: | Human-robot collaboration and Interaction (HRC/I) for industrial applications is considered as a challenging topic which involves not only technological aspects but also extends to social sciences and humanities (SSH) research. One of the main difficulties in human-robot collaborative assembly lines is to achieve an efficient process scheduling. However, a proper and efficient human-machine cooperation can increase productivity rates and quality of the overall process. This study proposes an approach focusing on the task planning of Human-Robot Collaborative (HRC) layouts for the assembly of large-scale parts. The implementation of a Human-Robot Operation Planning (HROP) module is presented, analyzing its architecture and the respective functionalities, which aim at the allocation of multiple operations between multiple and different types of resources. This development main pilar is a dynamic decision-making logic that combines both constraints, that exclude resources from the detailed evaluation, as well as multiple mathematical criteria, that provide the most valuable solution. The particularity of HROP is that it is developed under the Behavior Trees (BT) architecture. In addition, a novel and simple Human-Robot Collaboration - Quality Index (HRC – QI) is proposed, aiming to assess the flexibility, performance, cost, and quality aspects of applications involving the co-existence and collaboration of such production entities. The definition of this index considers several metrics for capturing the contributions and drawbacks introduced by the involvement of either humans or robots depending on their attributes and roles within the production operation. Four distinct case studies involving different HRC schemes in different production sectors are used to verify the effectiveness and ease of application of the suggested index, while one under a real industrial environment of the automotive industry, which is based on the assembly of large-scale parts, such as buses, in a hybrid cell of both human operators and multi-type robots is used for the validation of the decision-making logic proposed.
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