Survey on Human-Robot Interaction for Robot Programming in Industrial Applications

The recent trends in modern industry highlight an increasing use of robots for a wide range of applications, which span from established manufacturing operations to novel tasks characterized by a close collaboration with the operators. Although human-robot collaboration allows to relieve operators of exhausting works, an effective collaboration requires a straightforward interaction to foster the use of robot assistants. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on human-robot interaction approaches and related interfaces addressed to robot programming. An overview of on-line and off-line robot programming techniques is first presented. Then, novel intuitive interaction means, such as those based on multi-modal interaction, virtual and augmented reality, are considered. The paper aims at pointing out that collaborative robotics can effectively reduce operator’s physical workload if easy to use interfaces for robot programming are provided.