Human-Robot Collaboration: Enabling Flexible and Agile Work Practices
 
The great potential and benefits of collaborative robots are becoming increasingly evident among both the scientific and industrial communities. Robots can reduce stress by providing assistance; increase human capabilities while preventing injuries in industrial scenarios, automatize therapies in rehabilitation contexts, and improve in general the quality of life. On the other hand, humans can provide experience, transfer knowledge and supervise robots’ functionalities, adding a certain level of adaptability to the process and contributing to an effective accomplishment of a broad range of tasks. Towards the improvement of robot adaptability to the variations of the task and human states, this talk will introduce novel control frameworks and multi-modal interfaces that are capable of processing the human states and task performance, and reacting accordingly and adaptively.
 
Bio:
Arash Ajoudani received his PhD degree in Robotics and Automation from University of Pisa and the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in 2014. His PhD thesis was a finalist for the Georges Giralt PhD award 2015 - best European PhD thesis award in robotics. He is currently a tenure-track scientist and the leader of the Human-Robot Interfaces and physical Interaction (HRI2) lab of the IIT. He is the author of the book "Transferring Human Impedance Regulation Skills to Robots" in the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR), and several publications in journals, international conferences, and book chapters. His main research interests are in physical human-robot interaction and cooperation, robotic manipulation, robust and adaptive control, rehabilitation robotics, and tele-robotics.