Using hand gestures to interact with an industrial robot in a cooperative flexible manufacturing scenario

Gesture recognition is a booming field of interest for many researchers. The Human-Machine Interaction developed from using wired devices such as the mouse and the keyboard till using touch screens and nowadays is evolving to the gesture interaction. Simultaneously, the machine or the industrial robot in particular is developing as well. The usual trend of using an industrial robot in a typical factory is to isolate it from the workers during the operation, due to the safety regulations. However, nowadays a new generation of a safe cooperative industrial robot exists. These robots are no longer dangerous to work around the humans. In a flexible manufacturing system, a cooperative scenario between the worker and the industrial robot can achieve the flexible manufacturing objectives. Therefore, during this research we propose and implement a holonic control system architecture which connects the industrial robot with the worker together in the same work environment in a flexible cooperative scenario. Moreover, we use the worker hand gestures to generate control events associated with the worker activities. Accordingly, the interaction between the worker and the industrial robot can be established

Worker-robot cooperation and integration into the manufacturing workcell via the holonic control architecture

Cooperative manufacturing is a new field of research, which addresses new challenges beyond the physical safety of the worker. Those new challenges appear due to the need to connect the worker and the cobot from the informatics point of view in one cooperative workcell. This requires developing an appropriate manufacturing control system, which fits the nature of both the worker and the cobot. Furthermore, the manufacturing control system must be able to understand the production variations, to guide the cooperation between worker and the cobot and adapt with the production variations.Die kooperative Fertigung ist ein neues Forschungsgebiet, das sich neuen Herausforderungen stellt. Diese neuen Herausforderungen ergeben sich aus der Notwendigkeit, den Arbeiter und den Cobot aus der Sicht der Informatik in einem kooperativen Arbeitsplatz zu verbinden. Dies erfordert die Entwicklung eines geeigneten Produktionskontrollsystems, das sowohl der Natur des Arbeiters als auch der des Cobots entspricht. Darüber hinaus muss die Fertigungssteuerung in der Lage sein, die Produktionsschwankungen zu verstehen, um die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Arbeiter und Cobot zu steuern