Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The factory of the future will use smart machines to enable, support, and enhance the capabilities of highly skilled workers at their many tasks - increasing their ability to rapidly react to product line changes and simultaneously produce customized, high quality products. Such factories will be able to nimbly respond and adapt to new assembly methods and product mixes rather than being tied to specific product lines and methods - and thus will be able to grow their portion of the manufacturing sector in North America. The CHARM (Collaborative, Human-focused, Assistive Robotics for Manufacturing) project exploits this emerging smart machine paradigm-shift for manufacturing systems, by advancing the use of intelligent robotic assistants that can collaborate, directly and physically, with human co-workers in assembly tasks as part of the production team. We aim to advance methods for interacting with robotic assistants through developments in the perception, communication, control, and safe interaction technologies and techniques centered around supporting a worker performing a manufacturing task. These developments will be driven by a primary understanding of the support needs of workers in advanced manufacturing plants, and implemented using new technologies and methods supported by existing advanced robotic and sensing systems already developed or identified by our industrial partner, General Motors of Canada Limited. Our results will be deployed, tested and evaluated together on a unified platform for industry identified representative challenge tasks. By focusing our work to operations that are subject to the clearly defined commercial expectations, utilizing existing, advanced robotics platforms, and by narrowing the focus of the team to specific use cases that are representative of real-world manufacturing requirements, we ensure that this research will provide significant advances in robotic assistant technologies. The development of this technology, and the training of the HQP that will deploy it, will allow Canada to stay at the forefront of manufacturing automation in a very challenging and dynamic international marketplace.