A generic ontology and recovery protocols for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) systems
This work addresses safety and coordination challenges in HRC systems for domains like manufacturing and healthcare, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ontologies and architectures.
The paper introduces a generic ontology for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) systems, extending prior work to describe humans and define safeguards for hazardous situations, with ongoing experiments in simulation to verify the approach.
Humans are considered as integral components of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) systems, not only as object (e.g. in health care), but also as operators and service providers in manufacturing. Sophisticated and complex tasks are to be collaboratively executed by devices (robots) and humans. We introduce a generic ontology for HRC systems. Description of humans is a part of the ontology. Critical and hazardous (for humans) situations, as well as corresponding safeguards are defined on the basis of the ontology. The ontology is an extension of the ontology introduced in Skarzynski et al. (2018) arXiv:1709.03300. The architecture of SO-MRS (see arXiv:1709.03300), a software platform for automatic task accomplishment, is extended to HRC systems. Ongoing experiments, carried out in a simulated HRC system, are to verify the ontology and the architecture.