Trends and challenges in collaborative robotics:perception, motion planning and control

Nowadays, the applications of human-robot collaboration are increasing in several manufacturing sectors, unlocking new robotic solutions and enabling the safe sharing of workspace between human operators and robots. The primary challenge of collaborative robotics is to ensure safe, intuitive, responsive, and effective interactions during shared operations, especially when a physical contact between robots and human partners is engaged, both in the short and long term. Despite significant research efforts aimed at improving the reasoning, perception, planning, and control of robotic manipulators, industrial applications have not yet taken full advantage of these remarkable advancements. Reliability and effectiveness of solutions are still far from industrial requirements and research has to push further the state-of-the-art before a wide technological transfer to real production plants. While current perception systems allow for the accurate localization of objects and human operators in the working environment, further intelligent technologies are needed to anticipate worker actions and needs, or react flexibly to unexpected actions. This workshop aims to present trends and challenges in collaborative robotics, and to explore future prospects in this field, with particular focus on perception, task and motion planning, and control. Furthermore, notable results of recent research projects that seek to bridge the gap between industry and academia will be presented and discussed.