NRI-Small: The Intelligent Workcell - Enabling Robots and People to Work Together Safely in Manufacturing Environments

该奖项的研究目标是研究使人和工业机器人能够在同一工作空间内安全工作的方法。 目前的机器人制造实践需要人和机器人的物理分离，这确保了安全性，但在时间和资源方面效率低下，并限制了适合机器人制造的任务。 这项研究将开发一个“智能工作单元”，它增强了传统的机器人工作单元与感知系统，观察工作空间内的工人。 显式跟踪工人并估计他们的身体姿势的方法将使机器人周围的动态自适应安全区成为可能，从而防止机器人伤害工人。 将开发算法来识别工人正在进行的活动。 这些算法将学习基本动作组件的任务独立词汇表，这些词汇表将形成分层活动识别框架的构建块。 最后，将研究向工人提供机器人预期动作的反馈机制。这项研究有望为机器人工作单元的安全和监控提供新的能力，使人和工业机器人能够在同一环境中安全有效地工作。 这种能力将提高现有机器人工作单元的效率，因为每当有人进入工作空间时，机器人将不需要停止（如目前的做法）。 此外，新的制造工艺将使机器人和人一起完成一项任务成为可能。 研究生和本科生将受益于在项目课程中使用原型智能工作单元，而小学生将参加旨在激发与工业机器人和计算机视觉相关的STEM活动兴趣的短期课程和研讨会。

The research objective of this award is to investigate methods to enable people and industrial robots to work safely within the same workspace. Current robotic manufacturing practice requires the physical separation of people and robots, which ensures safety, but is inefficient in terms of time and resources, and limits the tasks suitable for robotic manufacturing. This research will develop an "Intelligent Workcell," which augments the traditional robotic workcell with perception systems that observe workers within the workspace. Methods to explicitly track workers and estimate their body pose will enable dynamically adaptive safety zones surrounding the robot, thereby preventing the robot from injuring workers. Algorithms will be developed to recognize the activities that workers are performing. These algorithms will learn a task-independent vocabulary of fundamental action components, which will form the building blocks for a hierarchical activity recognition framework. Finally, mechanisms for providing feedback to workers about the robot's intended actions will be studied.This research is expected to provide new capabilities in robotic workcell safety and monitoring, allowing people and industrial robots to work safely and effectively in the same environment. Such capabilities would improve the efficiency of existing robotic workcells, since the robot would not be required to stop whenever a person enters the workspace (as is current practice). Furthermore, new manufacturing processes that involve robots and people working together on a single task would be enabled. Students at the graduate and undergraduate level will benefit from using the prototype Intelligent Workcell in project courses, and grade-school students will participate in short courses and workshops designed to ignite interest in STEM activities related to industrial robotics and computer vision.