Abstract

The increasing adoption of collaborative robotics is reshaping the relationship between technology, organization, and human work in industrial environments. Within the transition from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0, Humanized Robots (HuRs) are understood not as a distinct technological category, but as a human-centered interpretation of existing collaborative robotics and human–robot collaboration configurations, emphasizing proximity, adaptability, transparency, ergonomic support, and socio-technical integration. However, the literature on human–robot collaboration remains fragmented across technical-regulatory, human factors, and organizational perspectives, with limited attention to how risk assessment outputs are translated into operational practices and decision-making support over time. To address this gap, this paper proposes a preliminary conceptual socio-technical framework for the safe integration of HuRs in industrial human-centered systems. The framework is structured around five interdependent operational levels: hazard identification, risk measures, validation and testing, KPI-based monitoring, and operational control. At its core, the framework adopts and extends the concept of safety readiness, defining it as the organizational capability to translate, sustain, and update risk-related decisions across the system lifecycle while preserving alignment between assessed risk and managed risk under changing operational conditions. The framework, its KPI-based operationalization, and the scenario-based application are conceptual and illustrative in nature. Their operational validity remains to be established through empirical studies in real HuR/HRC settings. This paper’s core contribution lies in formalizing the integration layer through which risk assessment outputs are translated into validation, KPI-based monitoring, and operational-control decisions across the system lifecycle, with safety readiness serving as the bridging construct between assessed risk and managed risk. This paper contributes by reconceptualizing safety in HuR systems as a dynamic and lifecycle-based property, formalizing the integration layer through which risk assessment outputs are translated into validation, KPI-based monitoring, and operational-control decisions across the system lifecycle, with safety readiness serving as the bridging construct between assessed risk and managed risk.

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