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

人类技术前沿工作的未来(FW-HTF)是美国国家科学基金会宣布的未来投资的十大新想法之一。FW-HTF跨部门计划旨在通过支持融合研究来应对不断变化的工作和工作格局带来的挑战和机遇。普渡大学、印第安纳大学和麻省理工学院的这个合作项目是基于这样一个基本原理，即今天的制造商，特别是中小型企业可能难以跟上制造业的快速变化。为了帮助制造商在快速变化的行业中蓬勃发展，该项目旨在开发一个物理模拟平台，该平台将逼真地模拟未来工厂中工人、机器人和机器之间的交互，同时提高工厂的敏捷性和生产率。该项目将为工人在制造中的空间、多任务和预测性任务能力，以及他们在共享和顺畅的工作流程中的表现提供新的见解。然后，通过扩大认知能力，并将一些认知负担转移到人工智能和智能自动化，这些洞察力可以用来塑造未来扩大的制造环境。这样的改变可以提高生产力和员工体验。该项目将探索对不同类型工人的经济影响，以及基于人工智能的增强技术对人类劳动力、工厂生产率和敏捷性的好处。此外，该项目将通过制定教育计划和外联活动来促进劳动力发展，为工人为未来的制造业工作场所做好准备。研究人员将通过向他们介绍作为该项目一部分开发的新工具包和课程，直接吸引服务不足的年轻人。然后，这些材料可以被全国各地的教育工作者改编。目前存在强大的行业合作，以促进该方法的测试和采用。由机械和电气工程师、心理学家、计算机科学家、教育研究人员和经济学家组成的研究团队将努力实现五个目标：(1)使用混合现实来捕获尽可能接近真实制造环境的交互、共享工作流和协作任务；(2)开发和演示新型创作平台，以编程机器人、基于物联网的机器以及与其交互的人类，使用增强现实、人工智能来大幅减少认知负荷，并提高工人和工厂的整体能力和生产率；(3)发现、设计和开发灵活的协作智能工作流程和衡量标准，以模拟和评估人类-机器人-机器共享工作；(4)评估共享工作经济学和使用机器人、增强现实和人工智能增强人类的劳动力市场影响；以及(5)预先掌握劳动力技能，并提高对人-技术界面未来工作的参与度。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，认为值得支持。

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.