A Human-Centered Dynamic Scheduling Architecture for Collaborative Application

-- In collaborative robotic applications, human and robot have to work together during a whole shift for executing a sequence of jobs. The performance of the human robot team can be enhanced by scheduling the right tasks to the human and the robot. The scheduling should consider the task execution constraints, the variability in the task execution by the human, and the job quality of the human. Therefore, it is necessary to dynamically schedule the assigned tasks. In this paper, we propose a two-layered architecture for task allocation and scheduling in a collaborative cell. Job quality is explicitly considered during the allocation of the tasks and over a sequence of jobs. The tasks are dynamically scheduled based on the real time monitoring of the human's activities. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is experimentally validated. In recent years, industrial setting has been supported by a constant increase in the use of collaborative robotics (see e.g. The shift towards collaborative robotics can significantly change the quality of the job for the human. In fact, collaborative robots can take over dull, heavy or dangerous tasks making the life of the human easier.