Human-centric assembly in smart factories
Lihui Wang, Robert X. Gao, Jörg Krüger, József Váncza
Abstract
Assembly in future smart factories needs to address three challenges, including human centricity, sustainability, and resilience. Conventional approaches for automation in assembly have reached a bottleneck in terms of operation automomy, leaving various tasks to continued manual labour by human operators . To ease the burden on humans both physically and intellectually, human-centric assembly enhanced by augmented robots, cognitive systems, mixed reality and collaborative intelligence, assisted by thought-driven brain robotic controls, provides a promising solution. Within the context, this keynote provides an in-depth analysis of the state of human-centric assembly and identifies potentially fruitful research directions in future smart factories.