Ease-Of of Cobots

Abstract

Collaborative robots are relatively new in industry and in academy. While usage of cobots are rapidly increasing in industry as a result of the rise of 4th Industrial Revolution, they are also becoming more popular in non-industrial usages like home-use, office-use etc. Reason behind rapid spread of cobots to many industrial and non-industrial fields is their collaborative nature which allows intuitive interaction with human. Human has complex physical, intellectual, and physiological structure. Hence, cobots are intuitive for human to the extent that they provide as close interaction experience as possible to human abilities and human way-of-acting. To achieve this goal, one important aspect of cobots which need to be carefully designed is ease-of-use. There are a number of alternative methods for operating and programming cobots nowadays. This paper introduces the current status of research in this area and makes some comments on the importance of more improved methods for easier use of cobots. Moreover, it is concluded that -parallel to the fact that human is a complex creature- design of new methods for operating and programming cobots is a multidisciplinary field where disciplines like linguistics, psychology, mathematics, computer science, industrial design etc. need to contribute for better results.