Humans and Robots: Combating Fatigue With Autonomy
Humans and robots may be sharing some of the same goals and manufacturing spaces soon as autonomy and robot technology continue to advance. Researchers at Texas A&M University are analyzing how they can work in unison to allow for one party to step up where the other may temporarily lack.
Sarah Hopko, lead researcher and doctoral student, and Ranjana Mehta, associate professor in the Wm Michael Barnes Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and former graduate student Riya Khurana and Prabhakar Pagilla, professor in the J. Mike Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, are researching the correlation between humans and autonomous assistance in manufacturing settings with large amounts of repetitive work. They hope to determine how a robot can be programmed to step in during human fatigue in a trustworthy manner.