THESIS DEFENSE OF Benjamin CAMBLOR - April 18, 2024

Benjamin CAMBLOR will defend his thesis on April 18th, 2024 (Ada Lovelace, Centre Inria de l’université de Bordeaux, 200 Av. de la Vieille Tour, 33405 Talence) on the subject : “Exploiting robot motion to improve situation awareness in human-robot collaboration”.

One of the challenges of Industry 4.0 is to preserve the health and comfort of operators while improving their productivity. Collaborative robotics is a solution which, through appropriate assistance, enables the operator to focus on tasks for which he has expertise, while delegating loads and constraints to a collaborative robot. This involves combining the strengths of industrial robots (high physical capacity, repeatability, strength, endurance, speed, etc.) with those of humans (variability, reactions to uncertainty). An analysis of industrial robotics accidents highlighted a number of similar accident patterns linked to poor situational awareness. In addition, it seems that the lack of situation awareness is due to poor use of the means of communication. This thesis proposes to use robot motion as a means of communication that supports human situation awareness in human-robot collaboration. One of the important points of our contribution is that these movements, referred to as signaling motions, can be generated while enabling the robot to perform actions thanks to the redundancy of its joints.