Towards User-Awareness in Human-Robot Collaboration for Future Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems constitute one of the core concepts in Industry 4.0 aiming at realizing production systems that combine the efforts from human workers, robots and intelligent entities. This is particularly true in Human-Robot Collaboration manufacturing where a tight peer-to-peer interaction between humans and (intelligent) autonomous robots is necessary. Such production systems need a holistic integration along different levels of abstraction and coordination for deploying effective and safe control solutions. We propose the use of novel Artificial Intelligence technologies to enhance flexibility and adaptability of these collaborative systems. Our aim is to advance the classical human-aware paradigm that considers the worker as an anonymous acting entity, in favour of a user-aware paradigm, that considers a worker as profiled user characterized with a number of specific features influencing the "shape" of the collaboration.Preprint of the paper published within the official proceedings of 26th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2021