Human-Robot Collaboration: a Survey

As robots are gradually leaving highly structured factory environments and moving into human populated environments, they need to possess more complex cognitive abilities. They do not only have to operate efficiently and safely in natural, populated environments, but also be able to achieve higher levels of cooperation and communication with humans. Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is a research field with a wide range of applications, future scenarios, and potentially a high economic impact. HRC is an interdisciplinary research area comprising classical robotics, cognitive sciences, and psychology. This article gives a survey of the state of the art of human-robot collaboration. Established methods for intention estimation, action planning, joint action, and machine learning are presented together with existing guidelines to hardware design. This article is meant to provide the reader with a good overview of technologies and methods for HRC.