FW-HTF: Collaborative Research: Pre-Skilling Workers, Understanding Labor Force Implications and Designing Future Factory Human-Robot Workflows Using a Physical Simulation Platform

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The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) is one of 10 new Big Ideas for Future Investment announced by NSF. The FW-HTF cross-directorate program aims to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the changing landscape of jobs and work by supporting convergent research. This award fulfills part of that aim.This collaborative project between Purdue University, Indiana University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is based on the rationale that today's manufacturers, especially small and medium enterprises may struggle to keep pace with rapid changes in manufacturing. To help manufacturers thrive in a rapidly changing industry, this project aims to develop a Physical-Simulation Platform that will realistically simulate interactions between workers, robots, and machines in future factories, and at the same time, improve factory agility and productivity. This project will provide new insights into workers' spatial, multitasking, and predictive task abilities in manufacturing, and their performance in shared and smooth workflows. Those insights can then be used to shape the augmented manufacturing environment of the future by amplifying cognitive capacity and transferring some cognitive burden to artificial intelligence and smart automation. Such changes can improve both productivity and worker experience. The project will explore the economic impact on different types of workers as well as the benefits of artificial intelligence-based augmentation technologies on human labor, factory productivity and agility. In addition, the project will contribute to workforce development by creating educational plans and outreach to prepare workers for the manufacturing workplace of the future. The researchers will directly engage underserved young people by introducing them to new toolkits and curriculum developed as part of this project. These materials can then be adapted by educators across the country. Strong industry collaborations are present to facilitate testing and adoption of this approach. The research team of mechanical and electrical engineers, psychologists, computer scientists, education researchers, and economists will work toward accomplishing five goals: (1) use Mixed Reality to capture interactions, shared workflows, and collaborative tasks as close as possible to a real manufacturing environment; (2) develop and demonstrate new types of authoring platform to program robots, internet-of-things-based machines, and humans interacting with them, with augmented reality, artificial intelligence to substantially reduce cognitive loads and enhance worker and factory overall capabilities and productivities; (3) discover, design and develop flexible representations of collaborative intelligence workflows and metrics to simulate and evaluate Humans-Robots-Machines shared work; (4) evaluate shared work economics and labor market implications of augmenting humans with robotics, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence; and (5) pre-skill the workforce and increase engagement towards the future of work at the human-technology interface.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.