Operator support in human–robot collaborative environments using AI enhanced wearable devices

Abstract Nowadays, in order to cover the needs of market for product mass customization, industries have started to move to hybrid production cells, involving both robots and human operators. Research has been done during previous years to promote and improve the collaboration between humans and robots, trying to address topics such as safety, awareness and cognitive support in form of Augmented Reality based instructions. Results of previous research show bottlenecks related to the way of interaction of the operators with such supportive systems though. Direct interaction approach with the use of push buttons or indirect-gesture based interaction, which are most often adopted by the researchers, require operators to constantly occupy their hands performing the relevant button presses or gestures. Moreover, previous approaches are hardware dependent and need a lot of customization to work with different hardware. This work tries to address these bottlenecks proposing the usage of wearable devices enhanced with AI in order to support the interaction of human operators with robots in human-robot collaborative environments in a seamless and non-intrusive way, wrapped around a framework called “Operator Support Module” (OSM). Among others, OSM supports a variety of hardware to easily fit in various industrial scenarios. Two case studies will be presented to demonstrate the approach.