An AI-powered Hierarchical Communication Framework for Robust Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Settings

Cohesive human-robot collaboration (HRC) for carrying out an industrial task requires an intelligent robot capable of functioning in uncertain and noisy environments. This can be achieved through seamless and natural communication between human and robot partners. Introducing naturalness in communication is highly complex due to both aleatoric variability and epistemic uncertainty originating from the components of the HRC system including the human, sensors, robot(s), and the environment. The presented work proposes the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered multimodal, robust fusion (AI-MRF) architecture that combines communication modalities from the human for a more natural communication. The proposed architecture utilizes fuzzy inferencing and Dempster-Shafer theory for deal with different manifestations of uncertainty. AI-MRF is scalable and modular. The evaluation of AI-MRF for safety and robustness under real-world mimicking case studies is showcased. While the architecture has been evaluated for HRC in industrial settings, it can be readily implemented into any human and machine communication scenarios.