Flexible human-robot cooperation models for assisted shop-floor tasks
This addresses the need for more adaptable human-robot collaboration in Industry 4.0 settings, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing sensing and planning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designing flexible robots to handle human variability in collaborative shop-floor tasks, proposing the FlexHRC architecture that integrates wearable sensors, AND/OR graphs, and a Task Priority framework for improved cooperation.
The Industry 4.0 paradigm emphasizes the crucial benefits that collaborative robots, i.e., robots able to work alongside and together with humans, could bring to the whole production process. In this context, an enabling technology yet unreached is the design of flexible robots able to deal at all levels with humans' intrinsic variability, which is not only a necessary element for a comfortable working experience for the person but also a precious capability for efficiently dealing with unexpected events. In this paper, a sensing, representation, planning and control architecture for flexible human-robot cooperation, referred to as FlexHRC, is proposed. FlexHRC relies on wearable sensors for human action recognition, AND/OR graphs for the representation of and reasoning upon cooperation models, and a Task Priority framework to decouple action planning from robot motion planning and control.