New research project
Use of collaborative robots, that allow shared workspace with human workers, integration of intelligent sensors enabling minor robot path corrections are already widely used in the industry. But although these advances are certainly great milestones, what still remained mostly unchanged and inadvertently hinders better integration, is the approach to robotic programming itself. In most cases the human coworker is treated more like a hindrance and a potential collision object that the robot needs to avoid, instead of an active cooperator for performing a common task.
The new project “Human-centered production through human-robot teaming” aims to address this problem and enable a completely new type of automation, by developing a technology that allows humans and robots to work together flexibly and efficiently.