Task planning for human robot interactive processes

One of the next steps in factory automation might not exclusively be an automation issue, but instead combining robot and human skills to further improve industrial work processes. For various reasons, there is still a low dissemination of hybrid work processes characterized by direct human robot interaction. For instance, it is very difficult to decide which manual work processes are eligible for a transformation to a human-robot interactive process. Thus, the research project MANUSERV delivers a tool to support this decision process. Here, the central concept is a task planning system capable of generating automated as well as hybrid human-robot solutions. Therefore, a structured description of manual work processes forms the input to the planning system. Subsequently, a simulation system verifies and evaluates the proposed solutions and generates the necessary information for a transformation of the planning results to a real application scenario.