Real-Time Adaptive Assembly Scheduling in Human-Multi-Robot Collaboration According to Human Capability

Abstract

Human-multi-robot collaboration is becoming more and more common in intelligent manufacturing. Optimal assembly scheduling of such systems plays a critical role in their production efficiency. Existing approaches mostly consider humans as agents with assumed or known capabilities, which leads to suboptimal performance in realistic applications where human capabilities usually change. In addition, most robot adaptation focuses on human-single-robot interaction and the adaptation in human-multi-robot interaction with changing human capability still remains challenging due to the complexity of the heterogeneous multi-agent interactions. This paper proposes a real-time adaptive assembly scheduling approach for human-multi-robot collaboration by modeling and incorporating changing human capability. A genetic algorithm is also designed to derive implementable solutions for the formulated adaptive assembly scheduling problem. The proposed approaches are validated through different simulated human-multi-robot assembly tasks and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approaches.