Towards a Complex Interaction Scenario in Worker-cobot Reconfigurable Collaborative Manufacturing via Reactive Agent Ontology - Case-study: Two Workers in Cooperation with One Cobot

Abstract

Close Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has been a great focus of research for the last decades. The outcomes of this focus is a new field in industrial robotics called collaborative robotics. A collaborative robot (cobot) is usually an industrial robot designed to operate safely in a shared work environment with the human worker. This in contrast to conventional Industrial Robots (IRs) which are operating in isolation from the worker workspace, the cobot is changing the concept of automation from fully automated operations to semiautonomous operations, where the decisions of the worker will influence the actions of the cobot and viceversa. Therefore, a communication and information control framework must exist to connect the worker and the cobot together to fulfil this semi-autonomous paradigm. This framework should be able to provide a method to represent the common knowledge which can support the collaborative manufacturing between the worker and the cobot. During this research we are proposing an ontology-based Holonic Control Architecture (HCA) as a proper solution to share and communicate the knowledge needed to achieve complex interaction scenarios between the worker and the cobot.