Enhancing Awareness of Industrial Robots in Collaborative Manufacturing

Submitted by Alessandro Umbrico on 02/28/2023 - 13:08

Tracking #: 3394-4608

Authors: 
Alessandro Umbrico
Amedeo Cesta
Andrea Orlandini

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors SW for Industrial Engineering 2022

Submission type: 
Full Paper
Abstract: 
The diffusion of Human-Robot Collaborative cells is prevented by several barriers. Classical control approaches seem not yet fully suitable for facing the variability conveyed by the presence of human operators beside robots. The capabilities of representing heterogeneous knowledge representation and performing abstract reasoning are crucial to enhance the flexibility of control solutions. To this aim, the ontology SOHO (Sharework Ontology for Human Robot Collaboration) has been specifically designed for representing Human-Robot Collaboration scenarios, following a context-based approach. This work brings several contributions. This paper proposes an extension of SOHO to better characterize behavioral constraints of collaborative tasks. Furthermore, this work shows a knowledge extraction procedure designed to automatize the synthesis of Artificial Intelligence plan-based controllers for realizing a flexible coordination of human and robot behaviors in collaborative tasks. The generality of the ontological model and the developed representation capabilities as well as the validity of the synthesized planning domains are evaluated on a number of realistic industrial scenarios where collaborative robots are actually deployed.
Full PDF Version: 
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Previous Version: 
Enhancing Awareness of Industrial Robots in Collaborative Manufacturing
Tags: 
Reviewed
Long-term Stable Link to Resources: 
https://github.com/pstlab/SOHO.git

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 22/Mar/2023
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

This is the third round review of the paper.

All my previous review comments have been properly addressed.

Still one minor thing is that Figure 11 has very small fontsize that I need to zoom in a lot to see the text in the figure, but I trust that the authors can fix that.

Review #2
By Daniel Beßler submitted on 18/Apr/2023
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

The manuscript presents an extension of the SOHO ontology, and a method used to construct a "decomposition graph" from the ontology that decomposes a goal into functions of agents that can be used to achieve the goal. This connects two previous works of the authors (SOHO ontology, and a planning formalism). The contributions have been applied on a series of different industrial use-cases. Overall, the paper is well written.

I was a reviewer of the first two versions of the paper too. The authors have accounted for most of my concerns, and only minor concerns are remaining. Overall, the paper has improved a lot over the two iterations, and is interesting to read. Hence, I suggest to accept the manuscript in its current state.

The remaining comments are the following ones:

- Not all changes in the new version appear to be properly highlighted in the text.

- The authors did not elaborate more about the use CORA in the paper, but their response to my remark is satisfactory.

- The Figures did not improve, some fonts are unreadable- However, the structure of the graph can be seen in the figures.

- The authors did not add additional illustrative examples.