We were pleased to see Benjamin Camblor defend his PhD thesis on “Exploiting robot motion to improve situation awareness in human-robot collaboration”.

Abstract

One of the challenges of Industry 4.0 is to preserve the health and comfort of operators while improving their productivity. Collaborative robotics is a solution which, through appropriate assistance, enables the operator to focus on tasks for which he has expertise, while delegating loads and constraints to a collaborative robot. This involves combining the strengths of industrial robots (high physical capacity, repeatability, strength, endurance, speed, etc.) with those of humans (variability, reactions to uncertainty). An analysis of industrial robotics accidents highlighted a number of similar accident patterns linked to poor situational awareness. In addition, it seems that the lack of situation awareness is due to poor use of the means of communication. This thesis proposes to use robot motion as a means of communication that supports human situation awareness in human-robot collaboration. One of the important points of our contribution is that these movements, referred to as signaling motions, can be generated while enabling the robot to perform actions thanks to the redundancy of its joints.

Keywords: Situation Awareness, Human-Robot Collaboration, Communication, Joint Action

Jury

M. CAUSSE Mickael,Professeur associé, ISAE Toulouse (Reviewer)

Ms. SPALANZANI Anne, Professeure des universités, Inria Center, Grenoble Alpes University (Reviewer)

Ms. CLODIC Aurélie, Ingénieure de recherche, LAAS Toulouse (Examiner)

Ms. LANDRY Aurélie, Maîtresse de conférences, Université de Grenoble (Examiner)

Mme. SAUZEON, Hélène, Professeure des universités, University of Bordeaux (Examiner)

Mr. SALOTTI Jean-Marc, Professeure des universités, Bordeaux INP (Director)

Mr. DANEY David, Directeur de recherche, Centre Inria de l’Université de Bordeaux (Co-director)