IIT research team develops ergonomic collaborative robot system for industrial tasks

January 13, 2021 | Case Study

Collaborative robots (cobots) have been deployed in industrial settings over much of the past decade. However, there has been little actual "collaboration" between humans and cobots to accomplish tasks together. Instead, cobots have mainly been programmed to accomplish tasks on their own, with the added benefit that humans can safely work in the same space as the cobot. Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have been developing systems that allow humans and robots to collaboratively accomplish tasks together, with a specific emphasis on worker ergonomics. In 2018, the team won the Kuka Innovation Award for this research by successfully demonstrating a cobot that could react to human movements during tasks like electric screwdriving, optimizing the ergonomic posture of the human.