A Concept for User-Centered Delegation of Abstract High-Level Tasks to Cobots for Flexible Lot Sizes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a user-centered interaction concept enabling human operators to delegate complex high-level tasks to cobots through task decomposition and reasoning, improving usability in industrial settings.

Contribution

It proposes a novel task-based communication method for delegating complex tasks to cobots without programming, based on triplet specifications and cognitive reasoning.

Findings

Effective task delegation in industrial use case

Improved usability scores for human-cobot interaction

Successful task execution with minimal programming

Abstract

Technical advances in collaborative robots (cobots) are making them increasingly attractive to companies. However, many human operators are not trained to program complex machines. Instead, humans are used to communicating with each other on a task-based level rather than through specific instructions, as is common with machines. The gap between low-level instruction-based and high-level task-based communication leads to low values for usability scores of teach pendant programming. As a solution, we propose a task-based interaction concept that allows human operators to delegate a complex task to a machine without programming by specifying a task via triplets. The concept is based on task decomposition and a reasoning system using a cognitive architecture. The approach is evaluated in an industrial use case where mineral cast basins have to be sanded by a cobot in a crafts enterprise.