Towards Autonomous Collaborative Tasks in Robotics

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My overarching goal is fostering collaborative robots operating in real-life settings in fields as diverse as autonomous multi-robot systems, collaborative human-robot tasks for industrial or rehabilitation purposes. Collaborative robotics is one of the most active research fields nowadays, it is one of the technologies that are expected to address a looming global shortage of experienced workers in the next 10 years. Such kind of collaboration can take several forms, for instance, a collaboration between a team of robots or a collaboration between a human and a robot. In both cases, the synchronization and action coordination between the agents are two difficult problems to consider. Moreover, even though existing algorithms in robotics can efficiently deal with well- to partially-structured environments, unstructured and dynamic environments are still considered very challenging. This is mainly true when the robots must collaborate in a team to achieve a task or operate around or physically interact with humans. Therefore, developing techniques and methods for teams of robots that are able to efficiently operate in real, unstructured and dynamic environments in real-time alongside humans is of most importance in order to have useful robotics systems operating in real-life settings. My objective in the current proposal is studying two key collaborative scenarios that involve two robotics sectors which are expected to grow at an astounding rate in the next 5 years, to reach 3.9 billion and 4.28 billion USD respectively, those sectors are humanoid and collaborative industrial robots. The first scenario involves a team of two humanoid robots cooperating to transport an object in an unstructured and dynamic environment, while the second one deals with identifying human factors (physical and behavioral) in cooperative tasks with a collaborative industrial robot. To achieve this proposal objective, I plan to start by investigating those two challenging research problems in order to come up with new and practical control and motion planning approaches to efficiently solve them. Studying those collaborative tasks will certainly help us understand the main challenging issues underlying a collaborative task, and furthermore provide valuable insights into the generalization of the developed approaches to other collaborative tasks and enhancing the synergy between a robot and its operator. The collaborative robots will reshape and reinvent the conventional role of robotics in manufacturing, hence paving the way for the new revolution of Industry 4.0. The aim of this proposal is two-fold: I)- advancing humanoid robotics field and putting Canada on the map for humanoid robotics technology, II)- training highly qualified personnel with advanced state-of-the-art collaborative industrial robots (cobots) to support the increasing needs of Canadian companies for robotics experts in the field of cobots.