Enabling End-Users to Deploy Flexible Human-Robot Teams to Factories of the Future

Abstract: Human-Robot Teams offer the flexibility needed for partial automation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They will thus be an integral part of Factories of the Future. Our research targets a particularly flexible teaming mode, where agents share tasks dynamically. Such approaches require cognitive robots with reasoning and sensing capabilities. This results in hardware maintenance demands in terms of sensor calibration. In contrast to intuitive end-user programming, system setup and maintenance are rarely addressed in literature on robot application in SMEs. In this paper, we describe a prototype software toolchain that covers the initial setup, task modelling, and online operation of human-robot teams. We further show, that end-users can setup the system quickly and operate the whole toolchain effortlessly. All in all, this work aims to reduce the concern, that deploying human-robot teams comes with high costs for external expertise.