  Human-robot collaborations have been recognized as an essential component for
future factories. It remains challenging to properly design the behavior of
those co-robots. Those robots operate in dynamic uncertain environment with
limited computation capacity. The design objective is to maximize their task
efficiency while guaranteeing safety. This paper discusses a set of design
principles of a safe and efficient robot collaboration system (SERoCS) for the
next generation co-robots, which consists of robust cognition algorithms for
environment monitoring, efficient task planning algorithms for reference
generations, and safe motion planning and control algorithms for safe
human-robot interactions. The proposed SERoCS will address the design
challenges and significantly expand the skill sets of the co-robots to allow
them to work safely and efficiently with their human counterparts. The
development of SERoCS will create a significant advancement toward adoption of
co-robots in various industries. The experiments validate the effectiveness of
SERoCS.
