Robots will change the world of work but their communication with human employees will be fundamental to increase the efficiency of a company
Cooperation between humans and machines will be the great challenge of Industry 4.0. Mediating in the human-robot “clash” will be the cobots. Also called collaborative robots. These are those machines that instead of replacing the human capital of a company collaborate with employees to increase efficiency.
They are robots like Sawyer, an automaton that has begun to work together with human employees of the company TUTHILL PLASTICS GROUP, a company specializing in injection molding. Sawyer is a one-armed robot, designed to increase the safety of personnel inside a factory. But there are also two-armed cobots like Baxter. A colleague of Sawyer, also made by Rethink Robotics. Both have proximity and contact sensors and security cameras. Their nicest feature, however, is the screen, which simulates the human face and its expressions. The face is precisely to increase communication between man and machine.
Cobots and Industry 4.0
The robot’s eyes move by simulating human eyes. For example, when Baxter points at something, it follows the object with its gaze, even though it wouldn’t need to mechanically. And it does the same when it has to grasp or move an object. In this way, it is easier for humans to relate at a working level with a machine that has behaviors similar to theirs. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers who collaborated on the project have also included some functions that we could define as empathic. For example, if we smile at Baxter, the robot will greet us. But it does much more than that. At MIT they have equipped an experimental version of Baxter with an electroencephalographic (EEG) decoding system that, by analyzing the scalp of the human worker, is able to understand when the employee is about to make a serious mistake. Basically, it can read minds. At the moment, this function is only in the testing phase and many experts have been critical of it. In fact, it is considered as too invasive and would not help the good relationship between employees and the machine.
Human-machine communication
And in fact the main problem at the moment remains finding the right channel of communication between man and machine. According to MIT researchers, the best communication system, for now, is represented by facial expressions. That is, to communicate, the robot uses the eyebrows, lips and eyes instead of a stream of mechanical words. To be able to communicate only with the face, developers would have to create very smart algorithms.