Inclusion of Disabled Workers in Production Environments through Industrial Collaborative Robots: A Company Case Study

The inclusion of workers with disabilities in industrial scenarios is a relevant challenge for the research community, both for ethical as well as for economic reasons. To fully integrate such workers, it is necessary to make them proficient in the execution of a large variety of activities, also the more complex ones. To solve this challenge, the adoption of assistive technologies which can enhance and/or complement the abilities of a disabled worker has proven to be particularly effective. In this regard, while cognitive assistance systems, e.g. augmented reality, have been widely explored, collaborative robots received a limited attention. However, such cobots are particularly promising when considering the inclusion of workers with disabilities, thanks to their capability of supporting a user in the physical execution of a task. To fill this gap, this paper presents a use case where an assembly process has been redesigned including a collaborative robot to support a disabled worker. The contributions of the paper are the development of a human-robot task allocation strategy to effectively include disabled workers and its validation in a long-term industrial experiment. The use case also led to the key finding that a correct enhancement of a disabled worker allows him/her to execute even complex manufacturing operations with better performances compared to those of a non-disabled worker.