HUB-CI Model for Collaborative Telerobotics in Manufacturing

This paper discusses a collaborative cybernetic system, where telerobots are controlled simultaneously by a group of distributed operators to accomplish a manufacturing task. To enhance the collaboration, this work introduces the HUB-CI (HUB system with Collaborative Intelligence) model which represents a cyber hub infrastructure with intelligent agents supporting the collaboration activities. Hand gesture commands from multiple operators are translated and aggregated by a collaboration protocol into a single control stream. The aggregation is updated according to operators' performance so that it is robust to critical errors and conflicting signals. The premise of early conflict/error prevention and co-tolerant scheme can help in reducing the risk of system's damage. Thus, a distributed conflict and error prevention network is designed in the current work. A case study of collaborative control of robotic manufacturing is investigated. Operators command telerobots to work in a remote area. The hypothesis is tested that collaborative control with HUB-CI model is more effective and less susceptible to conflicts/errors than single operator control. During collaboration, operators perform gesture commands in parallel to control the same set of robots with a command aggregation algorithm. Compared to a single operator manipulation, collaboration in HUB-CI can reduce the time to complete a multi-step task and limit the errors.