Human directed local autonomy for motion guidance and coordination in an intelligent manufacturing system

This paper discusses the problem of integrating human intelligence and skills into an intelligentmanufacturing system. Our center has joined the Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) Project, an international consortium dedicated to developing holonic systems technologies. One of our contributions to this e ort is in Work Package 6: Flexible Human Integration. This paper will focus on one activity, namely, human integration into motion guidance and coordination. Much research on intelligent systems focuses on creating totally autonomous agents. At the Center for Intelligent Systems (CIS), we design robots that interact directly with a human user. We focus on using the natural intelligence of the user to simplify the design of a robotic system. The problem is nding ways for the user to interact with the robot that are e cient and comfortable for the user. Manufacturing applications impose the additional constraint that the manufacturing process should not be disturbed; that is, frequent interactions with the user could degrade real-time performance. Our research in human-robot interaction is based on a concept called Human Directed Local Autonomy (HuDL). Under this paradigm, the intelligent agent selects and executes a behavior or skill, based upon directions from a human user. The user interacts with the robot via speech, gestures, or other media. Our control software is based on the Intelligent Machine Architecture (IMA), an object-oriented architecture which facilitates cooperation and communication among intelligent agents. In this paper we describe our research testbed, a dual-arm humanoid robot and human user, and the use of this testbed for a human directed sorting task. We also discuss some proposed experiments for evaluating the integration of the human into the robot system. At the time of this writing, the experiments have not been completed.