I-CUBE: Industrial co-bots understanding behaviour

Collaborative robots, or co-bots, are robots that work collaboratively with humans in a productivity-enhancing process, most often associated with manufacturing and/or healthcare domains.

Despite the aim to collaborate, co-bots lack the ability to sense humans and their behaviour appropriately. Instead robots rely on physically mechanical, hierarchical instructions given explicitly by the human, instead of utilising a more natural means to include pose, expression, and language. In turn, humans do not understand how the robot makes its decisions. Co-bots also do not utilise human behaviour to learn tasks implicitly, and advances in online and reinforcement learning are needed to enable this.

'Industrial co-bots understanding behaviour' (I-CUBE) will enable research in human-robot cooperation. We will bring together the expertise of the human factors work in engineering, the automatic human behaviour analysis in computer science, and machine learning.

Project Team: PI: Associate Professor Michel Valstar, David Branson, Ke Zhou, Mercedes Torres Torres

Project progress

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