A Participatory Programming Model for Democratizing Cobot Technology in Public and Industrial Fablabs

Abstract

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Collaborative robots (cobots) can improve productivity by flexibly assisting production workers. Nevertheless, due to missing use cases, cobots have yet to be widely adopted in manufacturing. Democratizing robot programming by introducing cobots in public fablabs (or makerspaces) could lead to new applications transferrable to industry thanks to the creativity of interested laypersons. Fablabs could also mitigate the risk of unemployment due to automation by training cobot programmers for manufacturing jobs. In support of the proposed approach this paper introduces a participatory three-layer programming model designed to enable people with little or no programming experience to become effective cobot operators. The model builds on task-oriented programming environments extending them by more versatile yet intuitive programming environments. The model has been successfully evaluated on the basis of a real human-robot assembly application.