Abstract
Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in industry is a promising research direction that has potential to expand robotics to previously unthinkable application areas. Orchestration of large hybrid human-robot teams carrying out many tasks in parallel within a shop floor faces new challenges due to unique aspects introduced by HRC. This paper presents a new approach to topological and temporal orchestration of hybrid human-robot workforce, considering the capabilities of robot agents as well as the potentially new roles that human operators may acquire in an HRC setting. We propose a two-stage approach to orchestrating large HRC teams: First, an abstract topological and task assignment problem is solved, which does not consider the precise sequence of tasks. Second, the result of the first step is used to initialize a constrained search for an efficient HRC schedule. Initial application of the proposed approach in problems of varying complexity demonstrates encouraging results.
This work has been supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program “HR-Recycler” under Grant Agreement no. 820742.
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Chatzikonstantinou, I., Kostavelis, I., Giakoumis, D., Tzovaras, D. (2020). Integrated Topological Planning and Scheduling for Orchestrating Large Human-Robot Collaborative Teams. In: Vouloutsi, V., Mura, A., Tauber, F., Speck, T., Prescott, T.J., Verschure, P.F.M.J. (eds) Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12413. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64313-3_4
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