Towards utilising Artificial Intelligence for advanced reasoning and adaptability in human-robot collaborative workstations

Abstract

Significant effort has been allocated recently by the research community for the seamless integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern human-robot collaborative (HRC) systems. Mainly in the context of human operator support and robotic object manipulation, the adoption of AI could become the main enabler towards the realisation of seamless HRC. This work presents the vision of the European funded project MASTERLY for an AI-based framework to enhance operator assistance and optimize robotic object manipulation. The proposed framework aims to contribute towards the realisation of intelligent, human-centric collaborative workstations focusing on two principal areas. The first area is human operator action recognition, which involves interpreting human actions to provide instructions and notifications to the operator only when it is considered necessary via Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces. The second area is the generation of a strategy for robotic manipulation of unknown objects. The proposed approach utilizes AI methods to identify optimal grasping points on unknown objects for efficient and precise robotic handling. The performance of the proposed framework is tested and validated in a case study from the elevators’ manufacturing industry, and more specifically, the assembly of the elevator's electrical panel.