Give me a hand — The potential of mobile assistive robots in automotive logistics and assembly applications

This paper gives an outlook on the potential use of mobile assistive robots in automotive logistics and assembly applications. Motivated by the rising mass customization and the high demand of flexibility in car assembly, the potential of robotic co-workers is analyzed including the proposition of a technical specification. Among the set of possible scenarios, given in car assembly, the mounting of trailer coupling is presented as a use case to highlight a typical application scenario of assistive robotics. Besides the specific use case, a set of general criteria for the industrial use of mobile robots is presented in this paper. To reach the goal of industrial assistive robots, new approaches in the field of safety technologies, robot reconfiguration, knowledge integration and intuitive human-robot cooperation are overviewed, and set in context to related work. Following an overview of state of the art systems and related projects, the paper concludes with future work that integrates the goal of the EU-funded LOCOBOT project for low-cost robotic co-workers.