The AI-PRISM consortium holds the necessary expertise to strategically improve the EU Smart manufacturing value chain in four domains: collaborative environment, robot perception and recognition, robot programming and human factors. We are working to achieve a suitable trade-off between complementary and overlapping among the industrial partners.
The essence of our project is social human-agent-robot teams’ collaboration with human-centred as its core, where all human behavioural (physical and verbal, psychological) developed models guarantee intuitive, safe, and ethical interactions in industrial workspaces. We have our expert English partner Cranfield University (CRAN) and their Structures, Assembly, and Intelligent Automation department to make this possible and shift the paradigm. They will lead the work on scientifically establishing human responses and requirements that need to be applied in designing and implementing AI-PRISM solutions and provide qualitative and quantitative data to demonstrate the impacts and improvements of the new solutions.
CRAN is an exclusively postgraduate university that creates leaders in technology and management. They work closely with businesses, industries, and governments across the world. Through their industry partnerships, applied research projects such as AI-PRISM, executive education, and professional development programmes, they work with over 1,500 companies and organisations. Therefore, their extensive experience is precious for our Human-robot collaboration behavioural analysis and modelling and a framework for assessing and developing human skills and abilities for working with robots.
Today the CRAN team is sharing a video introducing their Intelligent Automation Lab, which is twelve of the UK’s top robotics research centres and cutting-edge research in Robot Lab Live, presented by our colleague Iveta Eimontate, a research psychologist. The unique facility is well-equipped with various industrial robots, including a FANUC CR-35iA collaborative robot that can be configured in individual and collaborative cells. The physical elements are supported by software resources allowing research solutions to be investigated virtually.
CRAN develops the human participant’s research design and ethics. The engineers are responsible for working with the robots, AI modules, and specialised machines in AI-PRISM and will build their respective technologies concerning expected KPIs, identified through surveys and production data and approved by our ethics experts from CRAN. Their contribution is critical for ensuring the effective design of any system involving human interactions.
Regarding human skills, CRAN is taking a broader view of training and development that incorporates an understanding of operators’ social and emotional needs. They are studying current industrial workers and evaluating current training programmes to establish best practices and efficacy of methods. Then, at a later stage of system development, the design of our innovations will be reviewed in experimental/laboratory settings to gather user responses, identify skills requirements, and design and test a skills and abilities training programme.
Thanks to CRAN, we will adhere to the fundamental principles in EU research policy and national and international codes of practice. Our innovations will be based on values and ethical principles through ethical monitoring of research activities led by our partner. In addition, with CRAN, we will ensure that humans jobs in the manufacturing sector become more attractive and safer.
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