Sharework‘s main objective is to endow an industrial work environment of the necessary “intelligence” and methods for the effective adoption of HRC with not fences. It will provide a system capable of understanding the environment and human actions through knowledge and sensors, future state predictions and with the ability to make a robot act accordingly while human safety is guaranteed and the human-related barriers are overcome.
Given a robot, a worker and tasks to be made, Sharework will be implemented in order to recognize and understand the task which the worker is doing or has to do, and determine the robot actions to help without disturbing, either for bringing a needed tool, holding a heavy piece or anticipating to the next step of the process.
Sharework will develop the needed technology for facing the new production paradigm compiling the necessary developments in a set of modular hardware, software and procedures to face different HRC applications in a systematic and effective way while increasing their overall flexibility and efficiency in terms of throughput and human satisfaction.
The robotic systems integrating Sharework technology will be able to:
Continually select the best tasks to be performed and their timing based on the human task in execution.
Grant human safety, while maintaining itself flexible and efficient.
Observe the worker task, recognize and learn it.
Rely on direct and natural communication interfaces between human and system (such as augmented reality and gestures recognition) enabling the system to inform the human about its next actions and that allows the human to make specific requests to the system.
Perform a continuous evaluation of task execution ergonomics and provide posture corrections to workers.
Sharework aims to contribute to bring back the industrial production to Europe through an increase of productivity and flexibility of HRC on current processes involving manual procedures and/or those involving production of short series of products and those with high variability for which automation is currently presenting high complexity and is not cost-effective.
Furthermore, Sharework will contribute to increase the OECD Job Quality Index through work environment and safety improvement through allowing operators labour to share or delegate the simple and repetitive operations with robots while ensuring safety of the work environment and get additional assistance from the system (e.g. ergonomics suggestions), therefore, reducing pressure, health risks and improving worker satisfaction.
