Abstract
Human-robot collaboration (HRC) in industrial settings is among the hot topics in the context of Industry 4.0 and its exploitation of mature AI and Robotics technologies. The idea is to tear down the walls that traditionally separate human and robotic workers in manufacturing, and allow physical collaboration among them in time and space. While being an opportunity for optimizing some manufacturing procedures, HRC clearly poses a number of practical problems, e.g., regarding worker safety and privacy. Based on research in joint projects with industry at DFKI, the talk will explain the challenges and sketch how we have started addressing some of them using AI methods from plan-based robot control, originally developed for getting autonomous mobile robots to work.
Vita
Joachim Hertzberg is a full professor for computer science at Osnabrück University since 2004, heading the Knowledge-Based Systems group. Since 2011, he is also head of the Osnabrueck branch of DFKI’s Robotics Innovation Center. His areas of research are AI and Mobile Robotics, with contributions to action planning, plan-based robot control, sensor data interpretation, semantic mapping, reasoning about action, constraint-based reasoning, and various applications of these. In his research fields, he was the PI in a number of national and European projects. At Osnabrueck University, he served as the Dean of the School of Mathematics and Computer Science. Awards for his work include the EurAi fellowship received in 2014.