Computing in a Trust-Triggered Cyber-Physical-Human System for Human-Robot Collaborative Manufacturing

We proposed and investigated a bidirectional trust-triggered cyber-physical-human (CPH) system framework for human-robot collaborative assembly in flexible manufacturing. For this purpose, we developed a one human-one robot hybrid cell where the human and the robot collaborated with each other to perform the assembly operation of different manufacturing components in a flexible manufacturing setup. In the proposed framework, we configured the human-robot collaborative system in three interconnected components of a CPH system: cyber system (software system), physical system (the robot, sensors and necessary hardware), and human system (the human co-worker, supervisor and work environment). We divided the functions of the CPH framework into three interconnected modules: computing or computation, communication and control. We used a model to compute the human and robot’s bidirectional trust in real-time to monitor the performance of the CPH framework. We evaluated the performance of the CPH framework implementing it on an actual human-robot collaborative assembly setup considering systematic variations in the complexity levels of the computing module. The overall results revealed that variations in computing complexity significantly impacted the performance of the CPH framework in terms of human-robot interactions and task efficiency and quality. The results thus proved that it became easy and effective to monitor the performance and interactional effectiveness of a human-robot collaborative system modularly when the system was configured in the form of a CPH system. The results can transform the design, development, analysis and control of human-robot collaborative systems for various applications such as industrial manufacturing and assembly, military operations, transportation, healthcare and rehabilitation, construction, social services, etc.