Adaptive work instructions for people with disabilities in the context of human robot collaboration

The progressive development of human-robot collaboration (HRC) during the last decade, and latest in the context of the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), opens up a wide range of possibilities for integrating people with disabilities and elderly people in complex production processes. In order to support these user groups by compensating individual limitations, it is necessary to develop new multimodal interaction strategies as well as task allocation and orchestration concepts with special attention to ergonomics, personalization, and adaptability. Our research targets on transforming general work instructions of a HRC work process to individual and user oriented instructions and presenting them using accessible multimodal user interfaces, such that users with disabilities can participate in the process and, in cooperation with the robot, perform value-adding production processes. This publication describes a system approach to meet these requirements, illustrates a possible architecture and validates its suitability for use by presenting an implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype.