Toward Industry 5.0: Collaborative Intelligence for supporting enhanced human-cobot interaction in agile production, demonstrated through the creation of innovative in-process quality inspection services

Toward Industry 5.0: Collaborative Intelligence for supporting enhanced human-cobot interaction in agile production, demonstrated through the creation of innovative in-process quality inspection services

The project aims to install a cobot with multiple sensors, which will be able to provide subjective evaluations similar to those of a human panel, reproduce human movement and touch feeling as well as measure physical parameters (force, vibration, dimensions, etc).

The solution

The solution extends the traditional cobot based testing with data analytics which enables a precise discovery of:
- the (minimal) degradation level which indicates that the device cannot be used from the technical point of view (e.g. that the door cannot be closed completely)
- the (minimal) degradation level which indicates that a person doesn’t feel comfortable in using the device (e.g. that the door cannot be closed smoothly, from a user point of view)
What is especially important is the second issue, since it reflects the aspects of the user/human “touch feeling” when using a device. The assumption is that the user will not prefer a device which, after a period of usage, will be more difficult for the operation (e.g. more force to be used for opening the door).


Challenge

The main issue in the existing approaches for cobot-based device testing is that the focus is on the “performances” (esp. endurance), which usually requires the repetition of some activities (like opening/closing the door of a device, like washing machine) and measuring if the activity can be performed properly (e.g. complete opening/closing).
This approach is clear from the point of view of the pure functionality of the device: the door has to be able to be opened/closed many (hundreds) times and this should be properly tested.
From the technology point of view, this testing is related to the problem of equipment degradation (wear). Indeed, the door cannot be opened/closed properly if some parts of the door (usually replacebar) are degrading until the level which is disabling a normal usage of the device.



Impact

It is a new approach for the collaboration between the cobots and operators based on human cognition.
In the robotic context, the impact is related to the realisation of the cognitive perception by the cobots, which offers more intelligence in sensing and opens new functionalities beyond just automatising the mundane, repetitive tasks of human operators.
The proposal tackles an important issue for the agile manufacturing: how the in-process product (quality) control can be driver for the innovation and not only the risk minimisation step. We argue that, by exploiting further the proposed concept of collaborative Intelligence, the product testing phase can be an important input for the product design phase, e.g. finding the ways for optimising user interaction or improving user experience.

Facts and figures

  • FSTP Name:

    Intelli5.0

  • Beneficiary Lead:

    Nissatech, (named asSME1AI)
    www.nissatech.com
    Serbia

  • Beneficiary 2:

    TIME S.r.l(named as SME2Cobot)
    www.time-group.it/
    Italy

  • Beneficiary 3:

    -
  • Technology Area:

    Cobot-based functional and usability testing / simulation

  • End User:

    EMDIP

  • Start Date - End Date:

    01/11/2021 - 31/08/2022

  • Duration:

    11 months

  • FSTP Funding:

    186 201,00. €

  • TRL Level at Start:

    4

  • TRL Level at End:

    6

  • Number of early adopters raised:

    2

  • Project results
    The system helps very much in testing the usability of high end products where it is very important to satisfy the highest quality criteria.

    Nebojsa Dinic, Manager

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