NRI: Human Cognition Assisted Control of Industrial Robots for Manufacturing

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Advanced manufacturing, driven by industrial robots, is playing an increasing role in US economy. Robots are being used to carry out assembly, welding, material handling and fabrication. Even as such interactions are becoming more common in every phase of manufacturing, a perfect symbiotic relationship between machines and human beings is still very far away. Because of this, a majority of the robotic applications in manufacturing are currently limited to areas where a relatively low level of skill is required. This has restricted the full potential of robotics to augment human operators and improve productivity and quality of life. With recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain interface technologies, connecting the human cognitive thought process directly to robots and machines is possible, resulting in direct control of real world applications. By collecting the brain signals using sensors and analyzing the thought processes, many activities that take place inside the brain when humans take specific actions or think of actions can be identified and matched to known signals using fast computation. This new human-robot communication paradigm will be demonstrated by developing three manufacturing scenarios. The project will also have broad applicability in the design of robotic systems in fields outside manufacturing, including telesurgery, rehabilitation and space exploration. Results from this multidisciplinary research, which combines manufacturing, computer science and robotics, have the potential to improve the productivity of future manufacturing plants and can lead to new commercial ventures, which will help the US maintain global leadership in robotics and manufacturing, broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research, and positively impact engineering education.Significant future challenges in the development of a new human-robot communication system, which allows operators to perform complex high skilled tasks, will be addressed. The postulated paradigm will be explored by meeting the following intellectual challenges: (i) researching a novel methodology for communicating motion commands to a robot by imagining simple actions using a grammar called "actemes," (ii) new brain-computer mode and algorithms to classify these actemes and, (iii) an intent-based system that auto-completes robotic actions based on most likely sequence of events that human operators are planning to complete. Three robotic manufacturing scenarios will be explored to demonstrate the human cognition based interactions in manufacturing environment: assembly, direct control, and quality control through object recognition. Finally, by using a non-invasive brain-computer interface a wide range of day-to-day applications of robotics will be demonstrated.