Automatic Learning Improves Human-Robot Interaction in Productive Environments: A Review

In the creation of new industries, products and services -- all of which are advances of the Fourth Industrial Revolution -- the human-robot interaction that includes automatic learning and computer vision are elements to consider since they promote collaborative environments between people and robots. The use of machine learning and computer vision provides the tools needed to increase productivity and minimizes delivery reaction times by assisting in the optimization of complex production planning processes. This review of the state of the art presents the main trends that seek to improve human-robot interaction in productive environments, and identifies challenges in research as well as in industrial - technological development in this topic. In addition, this review offers a proposal on the needs of use of artificial intelligence in all processes of industry 4.0 as a crucial linking element among humans, robots, intelligent and traditional machines; as well as a mechanism for quality control and occupational safety.This work has been funded by the Spanish Government [TIN2016-76515-R] grant for the COMBAHO project, supported with Feder funds

Teaching robot's proactive behavior using human assistance

The final publication is available at link.springer.comIn recent years, there has been a growing interest in enabling autonomous social robots to interact with people. However, many questions remain unresolved regarding the social capabilities robots should have in order to perform this interaction in an ever more natural manner. In this paper, we tackle this problem through a comprehensive study of various topics involved in the interaction between a mobile robot and untrained human volunteers for a variety of tasks. In particular, this work presents a framework that enables the robot to proactively approach people and establish friendly interaction. To this end, we provided the robot with several perception and action skills, such as that of detecting people, planning an approach and communicating the intention to initiate a conversation while expressing an emotional status. We also introduce an interactive learning system that uses the person’s volunteered assistance to incrementally improve the robot’s perception skills. As a proof of concept, we focus on the particular task of online face learning and recognition. We conducted real-life experiments with our Tibi robot to validate the framework during the interaction process. Within this study, several surveys and user studies have been realized to reveal the social acceptability of the robot within the context of different tasks.Peer Reviewe