The impacts of industrial safety on environmental sustainability in human-robot-collaboration within industry 5.0

Abstract

As the Industry 5.0 paradigm evolves to the forefront of research directions, a dissonance emerges between smart and sustainable elements. This stems from the misbalance of priorities appointed during the engineering design process. Selection of technology driven features, such as collaborative robots and IoT devices are often implemented at the expense of other criteria such as environmental sustainability. This observation is investigated on a workstation designed for human-robot collaboration (HRC), but with limited regard to the energy consumption and carbon footprint incurred during its life cycle. Consequently, this research work attempts to understand the consequences of design decisions for HRC safety (physical and cognitive) on environmental sustainability. The impacts of various HRC workstation scenarios (including various safety features and components) are evaluated using environmental metrics while Design for Environmental Sustainability (DfES) is adopted to close the rift between safety and sustainability. This work uses material substitution and dematerialisation to compensate for the negative impacts resulting from smart HRC features, achieving a reduction of 10 % in both energy consumption and carbon footprint when compared to the same workstation not having undergone the DfES exercise. This paves the way for academia and industrial designers seeking to strike a balance between human-centric and environmentally sustainable HRC.