Research database

The concept of Industry 5.0, recently launched by European Commission, is based on three fundamental pillars: sustainability, resilience and human-centricity. Human-centered manufacturing emphasizes the need to bring humans back to the center of production processes and to use technology to support rather than exclude them. Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is a paradigm that embraces this vision and has the potential to enhance human capital. HRC is a direct form of interaction between humans and robots aimed at combining their skills to achieve a common goal. The main enabling technology of HRC is collaborative robotics. Collaborative robots (or cobots), unlike classic industrial robots, are designed to share the workspace with humans, promoting greater flexibility of production processes. Cobots’ features potentially enable their application in complex industrial tasks, such as assembly, quality control and service provision. However, the concept of collaboration for cobots still primarily refers to the safe sharing of the workspace with humans. A true and deeper HRC would require robots to have intrinsic intelligence, to perform their task by sensing their environment and adapting their behavior. More so, the full exploitation of HRC in the industrial context still requires the integration of technologies to recognize human activity: cobots with capabilities in understanding human activities and psychophysiological state (e.g., affect, fatigue, stress) can better support the operator during a task. In this perspective, intelligent cobots can represent effective mediators between humans’ well-being and manufacturers’ productivity performance. By bringing together academic partners whose skills range from manufacturing technologies, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the aim of the project is to study and improve HRC in industrial field, focusing on humans’ well-being. In detail, the main research objectives are: The assessment of the effect of HRC on the operator. A set of standardized tests must be defined, with the goal of assessing the effect of HRC through the analysis of the psychophysiological state of the operator during collaborative tasks. The modeling of human psychophysiological state. Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca MUR - BANDO 2022 The results of standardized testing may allow for the development of real-time prediction models of the human’s psychophysiological state, relying on the integration of multiple information sources (e.g., physiological signals, task status, workspace conditions). The optimization of cobot behavior. The ultimate goal is the design of behavior adaptation models for cobots aimed at dynamically improving ergonomics and human well-being in industrial contexts. Expected results of the project target the design of proactive and intelligent collaborative robotic systems (i.e., systems composed of robots, end-effectors, devices and sensors), which potentially leads to several benefits from technological, social and economic perspectives.