Virtual Reality based Human-Machine Interface for Human-AI Collaboration

Abstract

Human centric manufacturing is receiving attentions in Industry 5.0 era, emphasizing proactive involvement of humans in smart manufacturing. Especially, humans coevolve by working with artificial intelligences, learning and supporting each other, and advanced human-machine interfaces (HMI) are imperative to promote such collaborations. In this talk, a virtual realty (VR) interface for immersive and interactive Cyber-Physical System (I2CPS) is presented. The interface provides a virtual space that humans work with virtual systems such as digital shadows of sensors and machines, digital twins of manufacturing processes, and AI models. Next, the virtual works are deployed to the physical systems, improving accuracies and reducing human errors while recognizing the intentions. It is anticipated for workers to communicate with AI, teaching and receiving supports, thereby adapting to rapidly changing manufacturing environments and relieving the need of high-level skill training. Several robotic manufacturing applications in development are introduced to demonstrate its effectiveness. In addition, a couple of related studies are presented: 1) affordable and frequent calibration methods of collaborative robots using single wire encoder and 2) human-AI collaboration in robotic bin picking.