Human robot-team interaction: Towards the factory of the future

Abstract

In this paper we present a human robot-team interaction solution for automated task handling in an industrial work environment. The main idea is that multiple heterogenous robots with different capabilities support human workers by autonomously performing tasks for them. When a human worker asks for a specific item the robots need to collaborate as a team to grasp the item and bring it to the user. The approach combines various techniques from vision, robotics and multi-agent systems to create a flexible, low-cost solution for different task allocation problems. A proof of concept is implemented on a mobile manipulation platform and a low-cost personal robot.