is a research project funded by the Horizon 2020 program* that involved 15 European partners in designing new technologies for the digitization of human-centered manufacturing systems. The intent is to facilitate the integration of artificial intelligence systems and incentivize the adoption of safe and reliable standards.
The project has been researching, developing, validating and making new technologies available to the community. These include cutting-edge artificial intelligence models designed to be easily interpretable for humans through Explainable AI technologies. Others include active learning systems, simulated reality systems and digital twins for digital representation of all actors in the production system, including workers.
A major contribution to the latter technology was made by the Sustainable Production Systems (SPS) laboratory of the Institute of Sustainable Production Systems and Technologies (ISTePS). Specifically, an extensible and flexible IIoT platform was built to create customized representations of production systems and their entities, including humans. The dimension of worker characterization was also integrated by leveraging the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) standard.
The versatility of the platform, based on a modular infrastructure with interchangeable components, was demonstrated through application in two different use scenarios envisaged by the project: quality control (in collaboration with , , and the ) and intelligent navigation for autonomous mobile robots (in collaboration with and ).
The representation of the human component within digital twins, especially the use of artificial intelligence techniques to automatically analyze this information for decision support, has raised several ethical issues that are still being debated at the legislative level.
Vincenzo Cutrona, researcher in the SPS lab, remarks, "Technology is advancing at a rapid pace that regulations often struggle to keep up with. Over the course of the project, we have been constantly engaging with experts in ethics and regulations to ensure ethical, transparent and responsible use of our technology and avoid negative impacts on the role of workers in production processes. Crucial was the support of partner , which is always attentive on issues of artificial intelligence and ethics."
Besides SPS Lab researchers, a few Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) students also collaborated on the project through the research assistance track or for their thesis projects.
The platform developed in STAR has been an important resource for the research group, facilitating the development of other applications for the use of collaborative robots and paving the way for further projects on human-centric human-robot interaction.
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* 精东影业's activities within the project are funded by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).