Energy expenditure and makespan multi-objective optimization for cobots systems design

Nowadays, we are living a transitional period from Industry 4.0, with its principles of high productivity and high flexibility of modern production systems due to the mass customization, to Industry 5.0, that aims to realize a more human-centered design of the workplace in order to improve the operators’ wellness. For this purpose, new technologies such as collaborative robots are always more integrated since they are able to guarantee, at the same time, productivity and flexibility but they can also perform the more burdensome tasks, leaving to the operators the more challenging ones. However, since these systems are thought to work directly with human operators, it is fundamental to consider the human-robot collaboration, in order to correctly assign the tasks to the resources. This is the cornerstone of Industry 5.0, that points toward the realization of human-centered systems.