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Expanding Human-Robot Collaboration in Manufacturing

Image credits: Loughborough University

Machines and robots undoubtedly make life easier. They carry out jobs with precision and speed, and, unlike humans, they do not require breaks as they are never tired. As a result, companies are looking to use them more and more in their manufacturing processes to improve productivity and remove dirty, dangerous, and dull tasks.

However, there are still so many tasks in the working environment that require human dexterity, adaptability, and flexibility. Human-robot collaboration is an exciting opportunity for future manufacturing since it combines the best of both worlds. The relationship requires close interaction between humans and robots, which could highly profit from anticipating a collaborative partner’s next action.

A team of U.S. researchers have published promising results for ‘training’ robots to detect arm movement intention before humans articulate the movements in the Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing journal.

One of the researchers said that a robot’s speed and torque need to be coordinated well because it can pose a serious threat to human health and safety. Ideally, for effective teamwork, the human and robot would understand each other, which is difficult due to both being quite different and speaking different languages. The researchers propose to give the robot the ability to read its human partners intentions.

The researchers looked to achieve this by interfacing the frontal lobe activity of the human brain. Every movement performed by the human body is analysed and evaluated in the brain before its execution. Measuring this signal can help to communicate an intention to move to a robot. However, brains are highly complex organs, and detecting the pre-movement signal is challenging.

The researchers tackled this challenge by training an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system to recognise the pre-movement patterns from an electroencephalogram (EEG) – a piece of technology that allows human brain activity to be recorded. Their latest paper reports the findings of a test carried out with eight participants.

The participants had to sit in front of a computer that randomly generated a letter from A-Z on the screen and press the key on the keyboard that matched the letter. The AI system had to predict which arm the participants would move from the EEG data and this intention was confirmed by motion sensors. The experimental data shows that the AI system can detect when a human is about to move an arm up to 513 milliseconds (ms) before they move, and on average, around 300ms before actual execution.

In a simulation, the researchers tested the impact of the time advantage for a human-robot collaborative scenario. They found they could achieve higher productivity for the same task using the technology as opposed to without it. The completion time for the task was 8-11% faster—even when the researchers included false positives, which involved the EEG wrongly communicating a person’s intention to move to the robot.

The researchers plan to build on this research and hopes to eventually create a system that can predict where movement is directed. Of the latest findings, they hope this study will achieve two things: first, this proposed technology could help towards a closer, symbiotic human-robot collaboration, which still requires a large amount of research and engineering work to be fully established.

Secondly, they hope to communicate that rather than seeing robots and AI/machine learning as a threat to human labour in manufacturing, it could also be seen as an opportunity to keep the human as an essential part of the factory of the future.

U.S. Researchers have been developing a variety of technologies to help people with disabilities and diseases. As reported by OpenGov Asia, A new robotic neck brace from U.S. researchers may help doctors analyse the impact of cancer treatments on the neck mobility of patients and guide their recovery.

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Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

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CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

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Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

SUPPORTING ORGANISATION

SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

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HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

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IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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