Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in reintroducing the advantages of the human workforce into industrial production processes while keeping the benefits of machines already proven in production automation. Both industry and academia exhibit intense interest in the topic of combining human and robotic resources in collaborative production environments. Nevertheless, the domain of human–robot collaboration is still undergoing intense evolution—nothing proves it more than the diversity of fundamental approaches, world-views, and gaps in standardisation that all hint at the fact that even the overall understanding of the domain is yet to be consolidated. It is, thus, not realistic to expect that a single comprehensive morphological work would reconcile today’s multitude of views on human–robot collaboration, and this is not the goal of this introductory chapter either. Instead, the chapter gives an overview of the domain relying on a single selected paradigm, namely, multi-agent systems. This choice is based on the assumption that this branch of distributed artificial intelligence, having matured over several decades of research and application, provides feasible perspectives and terminological waypoints for collaborative settings under the structured circumstances of industrial production. The chapter aims to outline structural properties and mechanisms of collaborative systems from an agent-oriented point of view, and aims to provide a reference of terms and concepts which make many different views of the domain comparable. Further chapters of this book, as well as numerous application examples, known industrial solutions and standards, are positioned within this framework to connect theoretical waypoints and practical findings.
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Acknowledgements
Research for work presented in this chapter has been in part funded by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) under Grant GINOP-2.3.2-15-2016-00002 “Industry 4.0 Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence”, and the ED_18-22018-0006 grant titled “Research on prime exploitation of the potential provided by the industrial digitalisation” supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund of Hungary, financed under the public funding scheme according to Chapter 13. §(2) of the Scientific Research, Development and Innovation Act.
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Kemény, Z., Váncza, J., Wang, L., Wang, X.V. (2021). Human–Robot Collaboration in Manufacturing: A Multi-agent View. In: Wang, L., Wang, X.V., Váncza, J., Kemény, Z. (eds) Advanced Human-Robot Collaboration in Manufacturing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69178-3_1
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