Robots and Wizards: An Investigation Into Natural Human–Robot Interaction

The goal of the study was to research different communication modalities needed for intuitive Human-Robot Interaction. This study utilizes a Wizard of Oz prototyping method to enable a restriction-free, intuitive interaction with an industrial robot. The data from 36 test subjects suggests a high preference for speech input, automatic path planning and pointing gestures. The catalogue developed during this experiment contains intrinsic gestures suggesting that the two most popular gestures per action can be sufficient to cover the majority of users. The system scored an average of 74% in different user interface experience questionnaires, while containing forced flaws. These findings allow a future development of an intuitive Human-Robot interaction system with high user acceptance.

*The video published with this article received a promotional prize for the 2020 IEEE Access Best Multimedia Award (Part 2).

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Robots Under COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comprehensive Survey

As a result of the difficulties brought by COVID-19 and its associated lockdowns, many individuals and companies have turned to robots in order to overcome the challenges of the pandemic. Compared with traditional human labor, robotic and autonomous systems have advantages such as an intrinsic immunity to the virus and an inability for human-robot-human spread of any disease-causing pathogens, though there are still many technical hurdles for the robotics industry to overcome. This survey comprehensively reviews over 200 reports covering robotic systems which have emerged or have been repurposed during the past several months, to provide insights to both academia and industry. In each chapter, we cover both the advantages and the challenges for each robot, finding that robotics systems are overall apt solutions for dealing with many of the problems brought on by COVID-19, including: diagnosis, screening, disinfection, surgery, telehealth, care, logistics, manufacturing and broader interpersonal problems unique to the lockdowns of the pandemic. By discussing the potential new robot capabilities and fields they applied to, we expect the robotics industry to take a leap forward due to this unexpected pandemic.

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Data Management in Industry 4.0: State of the Art and Open Challenges

 

Information and communication technologies are permeating all aspects of industrial and manufacturing systems, expediting the generation of large volumes of industrial data. This paper surveys the recent literature on data management as it applies to networked industrial environments and identifies several open research challenges for the future. As a first step, we extract important data properties (volume, variety, traffic, and criticality) and identify the corresponding data enabling technologies of diverse fundamental industrial use cases, based on practical applications. Second, we provide a detailed outline of recent industrial architectural designs with respect to their data management philosophy (data presence, data coordination, and data computation) and the extent of their distributiveness. Then, we conduct a holistic survey of the recent literature from which we derive a taxonomy of the latest advances in industrial data enabling technologies and data centric services, spanning all the way from the field level deep in the physical deployments, up to the cloud and applications level. Finally, motivated by the rich conclusions of this critical analysis, we identify interesting open challenges for future research. The concepts presented in this paper thematically cover the largest part of the industrial automation pyramid layers. Our approach is multidisciplinary, as the selected publications were drawn from two fields; the communications, networking and computation field, and the industrial, manufacturing, and automation field. This paper can help the readers to deeply understand how data management is currently applied in networked industrial environments, and select interesting open research opportunities to pursue.

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