Analysis of challenges and opportunities of collaborative robots for quality control in manufacturing

The application of Human-Robot Collaboration on manufacturing systems has been increasing in the last years and comes hand-in-hand with growth of importance of Industry 4.0 related technologies. The fields of applications of Human-Robot collaboration are vast and what is sought is to relieve human operators of tedious and repetitive tasks, integrating the automation, repetitiveness, accuracy, and flexibility that characterizes the collaborative robots, and at the same time keeping the cognitive and soft skills of human workers. The quality control and inspection of products is something that, considering the high customer requirements present on today’s market, must be ensured and defective parts cannot arrive to the final users. That is why it is important to constantly search for new technologies that make this process the most efficient and accurate possible. Specifically, this thesis will focus on the analysis of the scientific literature and real case studies regarding the state of the art of quality control using collaborative robotics systems in manufacturing. The analysis will identify and define the challenges and opportunities that the manufacturing sector will face for the large-scale use of the new quality control paradigm based on human-robot collaboration.