Human–Robot Collaboration (HRC) has a pivotal role in smart manufacturing for strict requirements of human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. However, existing HRC development mainly undertakes either a human-dominant or robot-dominant manner, where human and robotic agents reactively perform operations by following pre-defined instructions, thus far from an efficient integration of robotic automation and human cognition. The stiff human–robot relations fail to be qualified for complex manufacturing tasks and cannot ease the physical and psychological load of human operators. In response to these realistic needs, this paper presents our arguments on the obvious trend, concept, systematic architecture, and enabling technologies of Proactive HRC, serving as a prospective vision and research topic for future work in the human-centric smart manufacturing era. Human–robot symbiotic relation is evolving with a 5C intelligence — from Connection, Coordination, Cyber, Cognition to Coevolution, and finally embracing mutual-cognitive, predictable, and self-organising intelligent capabilities, i.e., the Proactive HRC. With proactive robot control, multiple human and robotic agents collaboratively operate manufacturing tasks, considering each others’ operation needs, desired resources, and qualified complementary capabilities. This paper also highlights current challenges and future research directions, which deserve more research efforts for real-world applications of Proactive HRC. It is hoped that this work can attract more open discussions and provide useful insights to both academic and industrial practitioners in their exploration of human–robot flexible production.

人机协作 (HRC) 在智能制造中发挥着关键作用，满足以人为本、可持续性和弹性的严格要求。然而，现有的 HRC 开发主要采用以人为主导或以机器人为主导的方式，即人类和机器人主体按照预先定义的指令被动地执行操作，距离机器人自动化和人类认知的有效集成相去甚远。僵硬的人机关系无法胜任复杂的制造任务，也无法减轻人类操作员的身心负担。针对这些现实需求，本文提出了我们对Proactive HRC的明显趋势、概念、系统架构和使能技术的论点，作为以人为中心的智能制造时代未来工作的前瞻愿景和研究课题。人机共生关系正在以5C智能进化——从连接、协调、网络、认知到协同进化，最终形成相互认知、可预测、自组织的智能能力，即Proactive HRC。通过主动机器人控制，多个人类和机器人代理协同操作制造任务，同时考虑彼此的操作需求、所需资源和合格的互补能力。本文还强调了当前的挑战和未来的研究方向，这些值得为 Proactive HRC 的实际应用付出更多的研究努力。