Attentive Machines

Attentive machines

2016 to 2019

Complex manufacturing processes and extremely short product life cycles bring further automation of production to the limits of economic efficiency due to high flexibility requirements. Future applications should unite the existing capabilities of so-called “intelligent” production plants in terms of precision and power with the flexibility, fine motor skills and intelligence of humans in a collaborative collaboration.

The goal of Attentive Machines is the development of sensor/actuator systems that extend current systems, which are mostly based on pure presence detection, by understanding momentary activities, as well as perception and assessment of the mental workload of workers. The academic motivation of this project is to replace existing operating principles of participative (man-machine) manufacturing systems with operator-centered, situationally adapted and respectful operating principles. The Attentive Machines project therefore aims at the development of a reference architecture for assistive manufacturing systems that exhibit characteristic features of human assistance in the addressed criteria (employee productivity, work ergonomics, quality assurance, motivation, performance enhancement).

The developments will be integrated in two industrial application scenarios (Fischer Sports GmbH & Aumayr GmbH) and evaluated with respect to the two main challenges of collaborative production (i) safety in human-machine interaction and (ii) knowledge management and transfer.