  This paper develops a robotic manipulation planner for human-robot
collaborative assembly. Unlike previous methods which study an independent and
fully AI-equipped autonomous system, this paper explores the subtask
distribution between a robot and a human and studies a human-in-the-loop
robotic system for collaborative assembly. The system distributes the subtasks
of an assembly to robots and humans by exploiting their advantages and avoiding
their disadvantages. The robot in the system will work on pick-and-place tasks
and provide workpieces to humans. The human collaborator will work on fine
operations like aligning, fixing, screwing, etc. A constraint based incremental
manipulation planning method is proposed to generate the motion for the robots.
The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated by asking a human and
the dual-arm robot to collaboratively assemble a cabinet. The results showed
that the proposed system and planner are effective, efficient, and can assist
humans in finishing the assembly task comfortably.
