Adapting Autonomy and Personalisation in Collaborative Human–Robot Systems

Abstract

Adaptability in manufacturing context is the ability of either the workplace topology defined by the combination of hardware and software components or any of the workplace’s parts (i.e. hardware and software components and humans) to rapidly modify their characteristics and behaviours to cope with changing circumstances. Manufacturing systems need to be “Adaptive” to an ever-changing environment. This means also put together humans and automation taking advantage of each other’s strengths to balance flexibility and productivity requirements in an easy and cost effective way. To achieve this challenge, companies need to re-design production systems. Enabling “Adaptive and Smart Manufacturing Systems” was indeed considered one of the challenges for Europe 2020 strategy to be addressed promoting market-oriented projects by bringing together private and public resources. This chapter aims to introduce Europe 2020 strategy for the manufacturing sector, the role of European Factories of the Future Research Association (EFFRA) as industry-driven association promoting the development of new and innovative production technologies and pre-competitive research by engaging in a public–private partnership with the European Union called ‘Factories of the Future'. Some success stories in the “Adaptive and smart Manufacturing Systems” research domain will be introduced and, in particular, the project A4BLUE (Grant ID 723,828) will be illustrated in more detail for its interesting results addressing the expected scientific challenge and scope of FOF-04-2016 (Continuous adaptation of work environments with changing levels of automation in evolving production systems).

https://www.effra.eu/effra.