Human-machine collaboration brings us closer to the smart factory
Human-machine collaboration brings us closer to the smart factory
Human-machine collaboration brings us closer to the smart factory
The human factor and support for the 4.0 worker at all stages of his or her working life are the vectors on which the COGILE research project has focused.
A group of engineering and technology experts from Mondragon Unibertsitatea, TECNALIA, TEKNIKER and VICOMTECH and ELHUYAR Fundazioa have joined forces to carry out the COGILE project, a project that focuses on researching and developing enabling technologies for efficient cooperation between workers and the intelligent systems of the Factory of the Future.
The aim of this development is focused on taking steps towards collaborative environments in which people and machines are able to work side by side in industrial plants, adapting to their physical capacities, sensory-motor needs and cognitive abilities so that they can carry out their work using everything that technology provides to the maximum.
The team of experts working on the project has been able to cross-check its progress and applications with a steering committee. This committee, made up of companies from the industrial, automation engineering and technology sectors, as well as information systems suppliers, has guaranteed its future approach to the market and has made it possible to focus the developments on generating an effective and practical tool for companies.
Through technological axes such as simulation with virtual reality and augmented reality, monitoring of the operator's confidence in the system, adaptive interfaces and conversational agents, the aim has been to adapt intelligent industrial systems to the operator, putting the person at the centre of automation.
The result
The end result is two demonstrators or use cases.
The first case is focused on training scenarios with Virtual Reality in machining tasks. Specifically, in an immersive way, the manual control of machining is simulated with the movements of the tool and the interaction through Mixed Reality (the person can visualise their hands and feel the sensation of touching a virtual element). In addition, a virtual voice assistant has been included, which provides answers when the person raises any questions regarding the operation.
The second, oriented towards collaborative inspection/assembly, uses Mixed Reality and voice commands. In this case, a person operates on a section of an aircraft aileron and, by programming the robot's actions from the mixed environment, is able to visualise these actions before they are executed, confirming their execution by voice. In this way, the objective of carrying out inspection tasks collaboratively and through multimodal interaction is achieved.
Its validation and assessment has been twofold. On the one hand, in the training world with teachers and students from the Higher Polytechnic School of Mondragon Unibertsitatea and, on the other hand, with the final contrast, on 24 March, with the companies RPK, Fagor Automation and Iruña Technologies.
This research project, carried out thanks to the Basque Government's Elkartek programme, marks a technological principle with a long way to go in its adaptation to the possible specific needs of industrial companies to work more efficiently and effectively. In other words, to improve the quality of life of workers, increasing their well-being and productivity. Likewise, this project represents a great advance in industry and especially in the training of people and their work in the plant, as it will allow technology to be adapted to the needs of people, instead of forcing workers to adapt to technology.
