Themen

As the demand for customized products and efficient use of resources has grown significantly, especially among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), these companies are approaching collaborative robots (cobots) for automating tasks and adapting to these demands. The cobots prioritize the safety of human operators and offer high flexibility. As the number of such robots grows, the need to manage their coordination and collaboration arises too. This presents new challenges for ensuring safety, security and coordination in shared spaces. Therefore, this study will contribute to addressing these challenges by providing a structured overview of the existing multi-human-cobot collaboration. In this context, a multi-human-cobot setup must include atleast two cobots or two humans along with the other, to realize our research. Description: • The thesis involves conducting a systematic literature review on the existing collaboration for multi-human-robot systems. • The goal is to provide an overview of how a multiple robotic setup coordinate with each other. • The focus is to summarize the existing research and practical approaches from other research, industries and deployed solutions, simplifying complex information in the survey. Learning Objectives: • Gain knowledge about cobots, their architectures and state-of-the-art solutions. • To learn how collaboration in robots is organized and coordinated. • Compare different collaboration approaches. • Identify common challenges and open questions in this direction.

Background ======================= As the collaborative robots (cobots) move beyond the horizon of single-human-robot interaction, into the domain of multiple actors (humans and robots) working in shared workspaces, thus, evaluating their performances through traditional metrics like cycle time, success rates, repeatability, etc. are insufficient to capture the complexity of a multi-human-robot collaboration (multi-HRC) system. The aim of this seminar is to explore and classify existing and new metrics that can be suitable for multiple-HRC systems. It will include a detailed review of existing literature from human factors, ergonomics, control theory, etc. along with the assessment of interaction quality, safety, fluency, coordination and other parameters in a shared setting. ======================= Learning Objectives: - Understand the role of metrics evaluation in multi-HRC performance and safety. - Conduct a literature review on metrics from robotics, human-machine interaction and cognitive science. - Categorize metrics in different dimensions. For e.g. fluency, safety, security, mutual awareness and trust. - Identify gaps in current evaluation methods for multi-HRC. - Propose novel candidate metrics for collaborative systems. Example references: 1. Saleh, J.A., Karray, F. (2011). Towards Unified Performance Metrics for Multi-robot Human Interaction Systems. In: Kamel, M., Karray, F., Gueaieb, W., Khamis, A. (eds) Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. AIS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6752. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21538-4_31 2. Lanssie Mingyue Ma, Martijn Ijtsma, Karen M. Feigh, and Amy R. Pritchett. 2022. Metrics for Human-Robot Team Design: A Teamwork Perspective on Evaluation of Human-Robot Teams. J. Hum.-Robot Interact. 11, 3, Article 30 (September 2022), 36 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3522581