Trend Opportunity Profile: Human-robot Collaboration

Visionary Perspective on Advances in Automation and Robotics

Robotics is increasingly used in both industrial and non-industrial settings. This research service focuses on non-industrial robots that collaborate and work with humans. Such human-robot collaboration aims to offer convenience and care, control and monitoring, learning assistance, or other tasks which may require significant human effort and to help humans step into a new era of ease and effective management of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.

Two major disruptive forces have affected and accelerated human-robot collaboration: the COVID-19 pandemic and the growth of IoT. The pandemic has boosted the uptake of contactless care and the use of robotic assistants for cleaning, monitoring, or caring for the elderly and so on. The dual technological disruption caused by the rapid growth of IoT and the advent of 5G has enhanced the scope of capabilities of such robots and sped up the assimilation of robotic assistance quicker.

The use of human-oriented robots and the likely absorption of unintended data, such as personal conversations in a family setting, may trigger concerns around privacy and warrant transparent use (or non-usage) of data, primarily personally identifiable information (PII). Another significant challenge is the liability (or compensation) in the case of an unintended incident involving a robot; there is a clear need for such liability to be defined in the form of a policy framework. Robot manufacturers should also put together a comprehensive data management strategy that covers unintended data captured by personal-use robots. Despite such challenges, the market for human-oriented robots shows a clear preference for new categories of robots that will assist humans, right from the smallest task to complex tasks.

The role of a human-oriented robot is set to shift from that of an assistant to that of a companion, a caretaker, and an educator. The adoption of professional service robots may lower the need for skilled labor and, in some cases, bring about loss of employment. Therefore, a balanced approach that manages risks and challenges while expanding the benefits of such robots will usher in a new era of human-robot collaboration.