Public Lecture on "A Framework For Human and Robot Collaboration (Servant to Partner) "

Robots had been deployed for a number of decades in various industrial scenarios to perform repetitive and fixed sequence tasks under a structured and well-constrained condition. The tasks may be expected to be repeated many hundreds of thousands, or even millions of times, twenty-four hours a day and continuously for a number of years. The cost and time spent to program and commission each robot task, would be negligible considering the large number of similar products produced, and the relatively long product cycles. In the past, humans and robots did not share the same work environment. The current trend in the evolution of robotics requires human and robots to share workspace and to work in closer collaboration.

For Humans and robots to work in close proximity and towards collaboration, requires a new paradigm. The interactions need to be more intuitive and the task of instructing (programming) the robot needs to be less demanding on the human. For robotic assistance to be more productive the human role must be reduced and the robot needs to play a greater role in defining the task. Under such a paradigm, the robot’s role is elevated to that of a partner suggesting different options to achieving the needs of the human. This is disruptively different from the traditional role where the human is responsible for all considerations in a robot task.

In this talk the salient issues are discussed, a framework for human & robot collaboration presented, together with case studies in support of the proposed framework.