Effective path planning for multi-vehicle autonomous systems is essential to guarantee safe and efficient operation in industrial environments composed of both structured and unstructured settings. In the proposed framework, the overall environment is explicitly modeled as the integration of static and dynamic areas, each exhibiting distinct spatial and temporal properties. Static areas correspond to structured zones, such as corridors or production lines, and are represented by roadmaps with fixed topology. Dynamic areas, instead, represent unstructured portions of the environment and are modeled as gridmaps to enable adaptive navigation under changing occupancy conditions. Building upon this representation, a hybrid roadmap unifying static and dynamic areas is proposed, with a hierarchical control architecture for coordinated multi-vehicle navigation. The high-layer planner determines the optimal sequence of areas to traverse by solving a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem that balances efficiency, safety, and traffic-related factors. On the other hand, the low-layer planner generates feasible paths within each area according to its structural constraints. The MOO formulation is embedded in a bi-level optimization framework, where the outer-level employs a quasi-adaptive self-tuning process for objective weights, addressing the limitations of subjective or suboptimal weight selection. Experimental validation across two realistic industrial layouts demonstrates improved mission efficiency, reduced travel-time variability, and scalability with fleet size, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method for Industry 4.0 applications.

The demand for safe and ergonomic workplaces is rapidly growing in modern industrial scenarios, especially for companies that intensely rely on Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). This work focuses on optimizing the trajectory of the end-effector of a cobot arm in a collaborative industrial environment, ensuring the maximization of the operator’s safety and ergonomics without sacrificing production efficiency requirements. Hence, a multi-objective optimization strategy for trajectory planning in a safe and ergonomic HRC is defined. This approach aims at finding the best trade-off between the total traversal time of the cobot’s end-effector trajectory and ergonomics for the human worker, while respecting in the kinematic constraint of the optimization problem the ISO safety requirements through the well-known Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) methodology. Guaranteeing an ergonomic HRC means reducing musculoskeletal disorders linked to risky and highly repetitive activities. The three main phases of the proposed technique are described as follows. First, a manikin designed using a dedicated software is employed to evaluate the Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) ergonomic index in the working area. Next, a second-order cone programming problem is defined to represent a time-optimal safety compliant trajectory planning problem. Finally, the trajectory that ensures the best compromise between these two opposing goals –minimizing the task’s traversal time and maintaining a high level of ergonomics for the human worker– is computed by defining and solving a multi-objective control problem. The method is tested on an experimental case study in reference to an assembly task and the obtained results are discussed, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.Note to Practitioners—Health and safety in workplaces are business imperatives, since they ensure not only a safe collaboration between industrial machinery and human operators, but also an increased productivity and flexibility of the entire industrial process. Hence, investing in health is a real driver for business growth. The key enabling technologies of Industry 4.0, such as collaborative robotics, exoskeletons, virtual and augmented reality, require standardization and indispensable technical safety requirements that cannot ignore physical, sensory, and psychological peculiarities of the human worker and aspects like usability and acceptability of these technologies in performing their activities. Against this ongoing industrial challenge, the aim of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with an innovative HRC trajectory planning methodology focused on enhancing production efficiency while respecting the SSM ISO safety requirement and guaranteeing the ergonomic optimal position of the operator during an assembly task. Therefore, the proposed methodology can be a convenient solution to be deployed in industrial companies, since it can support human operators by drastically reducing work-related musculoskeletal disorders and augmenting their performance in the working environment.

This study introduces a novel control framework for human-drone interaction (HDI) in industrial warehouses, targeting pick-and-delivery operations. The goals are to enhance operator safety as well as well-being and, at the same time, to improve efficiency and reduce production costs. To these aims, the speed and separation monitoring (SSM) operation method is employed for the first time in HDI, drawing an analogy to the safety requirements outlined in collaborative robots’ ISO standards. The so-called protective separation distance is used to ensure the safety of operators engaged in collaborative tasks with drones. In addition, we employ the rapid upper limb assessment (RULA) method to evaluate the ergonomic posture of operators during interactions with drones. To validate the proposed approach in a realistic industrial setting, a quadrotor is deployed for pick-and-delivery tasks along a predefined trajectory from the picking bay to the palletizing area, where the interaction between the drone and a moving operator takes place. The drone navigates toward the interaction space while avoiding collisions with shelves and other drones in motion. The control strategy for the drone cruise navigation integrates simultaneously the time-variant artificial potential field (APF) technique for trajectory planning and the iterative linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller for trajectory tracking. Differently, in the descent phase, the receding horizon LQR algorithm is employed to follow a trajectory planned in accordance with the SSM, which starts from the approach point at the border of the interaction space and ends in the volume with the operator’s minimum RULA. The presented control strategy facilitates drone management by adapting the drone’s position to changes in the operator’s position while satisfying HDI safety requirements. The results of the proposed HDI framework simulations for the case study demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in ensuring a safe and ergonomic HDI within industrial warehouses.

Last-mile delivery is one of the most discussed problems of the last decade due to the growing importance of e-commerce and the development of Industry 4.0. In particular, this problem regards the delivery of parcels from the warehouse to the final customers. In order to bring efficiency and innovation, in this paper a hybrid delivery architecture is considered, which takes advantage of the combined use of a drone and a truck to perform a sequence of pick-ups and deliveries, and the problem of optimal control of the drones' missions is addressed. The reference scenario is the smart city where the drone of the hybrid delivery architecture is in charge of three different pick-up and delivery missions: truck to point (i.e., pick-up from the truck and delivery to the customer), point to point (i.e., delivery to a customer and pick-up from the subsequent customer), and point to truck (i.e., reentry from a customer to the truck). From the control point of view, the drone is optimally guided in all the operating modes, i.e., ascent and descent from/to truck mode, free flight mode with/without payload, and descent for pick-up/delivery mode, by a receding horizon linear quadratic regulator (LQR), which is able to manage the drone in the dynamic landing on a movable vehicle and to allow the changing in real time of the landing point on the truck. Simulation results of the truck-drone delivery architecture are presented and discussed in detail, proving the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper presents an application of human-drone interaction (HDI) for inventory management in a ware-house 4.0 that aims at improving the operators' safety and well-being together with increasing efficiency and reducing production costs. In our work, the speed and separation monitoring (SSM) methodology is applied for the first time to HDI, in analogy to the human-robot interaction (HRI) ISO safety requirements as well as the rapid upper limb assessment (RULA), for evaluating the operator's ergonomic posture during the interaction with the drone. With the aim of validating the proposed approach in a realistic scenario, a quadrotor is controlled to perform a pick and place task along a desired trajectory, from the picking bay to the palletizing area where the operator is located, avoiding collisions with the warehouse shelves by implementing the artificial potential field technique (APF) for planning and the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) and iterative LQR (iLQR) algorithms for tracking. The obtained results of the HDI architecture simulations are presented and discussed in detail proving the effectiveness of the proposed method for a safe and ergonomic HDI.

The fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, is reshaping the way individuals live and work while providing a substantial influence on the manufacturing scenario. The key enabling technology that has made Industry 4.0 a concrete reality is without doubtcollaborative robotics, which is also evolving as a fundamental pillar of the next revolution, the so-called Industry 5.0. The improvement of employees’ safety and well-being, together with the increase of profitability and productivity, are indeed the main goals of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in the industrial setting. The robotic controller design and the analysis of existing decision and control techniques are crucially needed to develop innovative models and state-of-the-art methodologies for a safe, ergonomic, and efficient HRC. To this aim, this paper presents an accurate review of the most recent and relevant contributions to the related literature, focusing on the control perspective. All the surveyed works are carefully selected and categorized by target (i.e., safety, ergonomics, and efficiency), and then by problem and type of control, in presence or absence of optimization. Finally, the discussion of the achieved results and the analysis of the emerging challenges in this research field are reported, highlighting the identified gaps and the promising future developments in the context of the digital evolution.Note to Practitioners—The design and development of manufacturing systems are experiencing substantial changes towards full automation. This ongoing challenge is being tackled by academia and industrial practitioners with the adoption of collaborative robots, where the skills and peculiarities of humans (e.g., intelligence, creativity, adaptability, etc.) and robots (e.g., flexibility, pinpoint accuracy, tirelessness, etc.) are combined to better perform a variety of tasks. Nevertheless, due to their different characteristics, there is an emerging need for designing suitable decision and control techniques to ensure a safe and ergonomic HRC, while keeping the highest level of productivity. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with a reference source in the related field, which can help them designing and developing suitable solutions to control problems in safe, ergonomic, and efficient collaborative robotics.

This paper focuses on the optimal scheduling of the charging and discharging strategies of a community energy storage (CES) system, which is shared by the prosumers belonging to a grid-connected energy community. The prosumers own renewable energy sources (RESs), while they can buy/sell their energy imbalance directly from/to the power grid. For the sake of increasing the penetration of RESs and reducing the operating cost, prosumers leverage on the shared CES: in particular, each user can only employ a portion of the overall CES charge/discharge profile. Differently from the related literature, where storage devices are individually owned and the battery degradation aspects are typically disregarded, we propose a novel control mechanism based on noncooperative game theory, which allows users to minimize their energy cost as well as concur on the CES resources allocation with minimal-degradation. The effectiveness of the method is validated through numerical experiments on a realistic case study, where a shared CES supplies energy to the local community of residential prosumers. Finally, the comparison with a centralized control approach shows that the proposed framework allows all prosumers to achieve a fair cost-optimal utilization of the shared CES.