Towards Autonomous Collaborative Tasks in Robotics

我的首要目标是培养在现实生活中运行的协作机器人，这些机器人可以在自主多机器人系统、工业或康复用途的人机协作任务等领域中运行。协作机器人是当今最活跃的研究领域之一，它是预计在未来10年内解决全球经验丰富的工人短缺问题的技术之一。这种协作可以采取多种形式，例如，机器人团队之间的协作或人类与机器人之间的协作。在这两种情况下，智能体之间的同步和动作协调是两个需要考虑的困难问题。此外，尽管机器人技术中的现有算法可以有效地处理良好到部分结构化的环境，但非结构化和动态环境仍然被认为是非常具有挑战性的。当机器人必须在团队中合作以完成任务或在人类周围操作或与人类进行物理交互时，这主要是正确的。因此，开发能够与人类一起在真实的、非结构化和动态环境中实时有效操作的机器人团队的技术和方法是最重要的，以便使有用的机器人系统在现实生活环境中操作。 我在当前提案中的目标是研究两个关键的合作场景，涉及两个机器人领域，预计在未来5年内将以惊人的速度增长，分别达到39亿美元和42.8亿美元，这两个领域是人形和协作工业机器人。第一种情况涉及两个人形机器人的团队合作，在非结构化和动态的环境中运输物体，而第二个处理识别人的因素（物理和行为）的合作任务与协作工业机器人。 为了实现这一目标，我计划从调查这两个具有挑战性的研究问题开始，以便提出新的和实用的控制和运动规划方法来有效地解决它们。研究这些协作任务将有助于我们理解协作任务背后的主要挑战性问题，并进一步为将已开发的方法推广到其他协作任务和增强机器人与操作员之间的协同作用提供有价值的见解。 协作机器人将重塑和重塑机器人在制造业中的传统角色，从而为工业4.0的新革命铺平道路。该提案的目的是双重的：I）-推进人形机器人领域，并将加拿大置于人形机器人技术的地图上，II）-用先进的最先进的协作工业机器人（cobots）培训高素质的人才，以支持加拿大公司对cobots领域机器人专家日益增长的需求。

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.