NRI: A Proactive Approach to Managing Contingencies during Human Robot Collaboration in Manufacturing

人类安全工业机器人的最新进展为创造混合工作单元提供了机会，在混合工作单元中，人类和机器人可以在近距离协作。这种能力使实现利用人和机器人互补优势的系统成为可能。在过去的几年里，市场上已经推出了几种新的低成本机器人，这使得它们在许多新的制造应用中具有吸引力。这使得混合电池的想法在经济上对中小型制造商来说是可行的，中小型制造商代表了美国制造业的一个非常重要的部分。人类和机器人都可能在混合细胞中犯错误，从而产生意外情况。如果不及时处理，突发情况可能会导致严重的操作效率低下。因此，除非主动检测和管理突发情况，否则混合电池不太可能具有成本效益。该国家机器人计划（NRI）奖支持基础研究，以实现在小批量制造业务中混合工作单元中人机协作过程中出现的突发事件的主动管理。这项研究的结果将使工业机器人在小批量生产操作中的引入成为可能，并有望使美国制造业在全球市场上具有成本竞争力。研究与研究生和本科课程的整合将增强机器人和制造课程，丰富参与学生的学习经验。外展活动将教育和告知K-12学生机器人和制造业的就业机会。为了使混合细胞具有有效的应急处理能力，需要在自动规划、细胞监测、重新规划和人机交互方面取得根本性的进展。本研究将探讨任务规划和资源分配算法设计的计算基础，这些算法明确地考虑管理突发事件。将开发算法，实时监测任务进度，确保任务安全高效地完成。将设计实时重新规划算法来处理突发事件，并根据观察到的任务执行性能改进计划。本研究还将探索和描述人类和机器人之间有效的信息交换方法，以处理突发事件。

Recent advances in human-safe industrial robots present an opportunity for creating hybrid work cells, where humans and robots can collaborate in close physical proximities. This capability enables realizing systems that utilize complementary strengths of humans and robots. Several new low-cost robots have been introduced in the market over the last few years, making them attractive in many new manufacturing applications. This makes the idea of hybrid cells economically viable for small and medium manufacturers, which represent a very important segment of the manufacturing sector in the United States. Both humans and robots can make errors in a hybrid cell, hence creating contingency situations. Unless handled promptly, a contingency situation may lead to significant operational inefficiencies. Hence, hybrid cells are not likely to cost-effective unless contingency situations are proactively detected and managed. This National Robotics Initiative (NRI) award supports fundamental research to enable proactive management of contingencies arising during human-robot collaboration in hybrid work cells in small production volume manufacturing operations. Results from this research will enable introduction of industrial robots in small production volume operations and are expected to make US manufacturing industry cost competitive in the global market. The integration of the research with graduate and undergraduate courses will enhance the robotics and manufacturing curricula and enrich learning experiences of the participating students. Outreach activities will educate and inform K-12 students about career opportunities in robotics and manufacturing. Fundamental advances are needed in automated planning, cell monitoring, replanning, and human-robot interaction to endow hybrid cells with effective contingency handling capabilities. This research will investigate computational foundations for the design of task planning and resource allocation algorithms that explicitly account for managing contingencies. Algorithms will be developed for real-time monitoring of the task progress to ensure that tasks are completed in a safe and efficient manner. Real-time replanning algorithms will be designed to handle contingencies and refine plans based on the observed task execution performance. This research will also explore and characterize methods for effective information exchange between humans and robots to deal with contingencies.