Collaborative, synchronous robots serving machines and cells

Multi‐arm, collaborative, synchronous robots are gaining acceptance in industry, because of the cycle time reduction, productivity increase, flexibility and quality gain, distributed control, layout design/simulation, and programming support robot manufacturers and system integrators can offer. On the negative side, when things go wrong such systems are more complex to recover, and maintain, than non‐networked and non‐distributed controlled individual robots. In this paper, we introduce some of the most important engineering, and technology management principles that collaborate robots and their users and should be kept in mind while developing such systems, and/or planning for such applications.