Towards Including Workers with Cognitive Disabilities in the Factory of the Future

Abstract

People who have cognitive disabilities can achieve personal fulfilment and social integration when they access the job market. In the case of working on industrial assembly lines, they can perform at the highest standards when assembly sub-tasks have been adequately adapted. However, the arrival of new production paradigms for the factory of the future (e.g., Industry 4.0) present new challenges and opportunities for workers with cognitive disabilities who will be part of hybrid human-automation assembly cells. We propose that alternative task-sharing approaches with collaborative robots may be more appropriate in the presence of such disabilities, in contrast to practices proposed for non-disabled workers. We describe a representative scenario (assembly of electrical cabinets) around which we are developing our research on this topic.