HUMANISE: Human-Inspired Smart Management, towards a Healthy and Safe Industrial Collaborative Robotics

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 19;23(3):1170. doi: 10.3390/s23031170.

Abstract

The workplace is evolving towards scenarios where humans are acquiring a more active and dynamic role alongside increasingly intelligent machines. Moreover, the active population is ageing and consequently emerging risks could appear due to health disorders of workers, which requires intelligent intervention both for production management and workers' support. In this sense, the innovative and smart systems oriented towards monitoring and regulating workers' well-being will become essential. This work presents HUMANISE, a novel proposal of an intelligent system for risk management, oriented to workers suffering from disease conditions. The developed support system is based on Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Intelligent Agents. Results: The system was applied to a two-arm Cobot scenario during a Learning from Demonstration task for collaborative parts transportation, where risk management is critical. In this environment with a worker suffering from a mental disorder, safety is successfully controlled by means of human/robot coordination, and risk levels are managed through the integration of human/robot behaviour models and worker's models based on the workplace model of the World Health Organization. The results show a promising real-time support tool to coordinate and monitoring these scenarios by integrating workers' health information towards a successful risk management strategy for safe industrial Cobot environments.

Keywords: Cobot; Machine Learning; ageing population; human/robot behaviour; industrial health and safety; risk management; workers’ diseases.

MeSH terms

  • Health Status
  • Humans
  • Mental Disorders*
  • Occupational Health*
  • Workplace

Grants and funding

This work is also based upon work from COST Actions CA18106 supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and the Basque Government grants, IT1489-22, ELKARTEK21/109 and EUSK22/17.