Robotic co-workers: methods, challenges and industrial test cases

Modern manufacturing companies are expected to quickly and efficiently adapt to production changes, and robotics has long been known as the candidate solution for the required flexibility. To improve such flexibility, future working environments will be populated by both humans and robot manipulators, sharing the same workspace. This scenario entails a series of issues and open topics, such as safety, optimal tasks allocation and scheduling, learning and error recovery, which are uncommon in today's industrial settings. Despite the presence of high quality scientific results, this topic is still open for more reliable solutions and further investigations, possibly taking inspiration by successful industrial test cases. This workshop is then aimed at bringing together academic and industrial point of view on the field of human robot collaboration, and update the discussion concerning their respective expectations and open topics. By exchanging ideas regarding available methodologies, implementation challenges and key success factors, we expect to address several new insights for the research community on human-robot collaboration in order to find better, more general and even more flexible solutions to common problems and open issues.