2022 Student Innovation Grand Award

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (TSANG Chin Lok / LI Cheng Xi / KWOK Hin Chi)

Mutual Cognitive Human-Robot Collaborative Manufacturing System

Description of Entry:
Human-robot Collaborative Assembly (HRCA) allows seamless communication and cooperation between human operators and robots to fulfil various manufacturing assembly tasks in a shared workspace. The system combines the high accuracy, reliability, and repeatability of collaborative robots with the high flexibility and adaptability of humans to realize the optimal productivity.

Despite the significant popularity of the collaborative manufacturing paradigm between humans and cobots in the market, the corresponding associated appli-cation areas and control approaches of cobots are immature. Cobots lack the ability to adapt to new tasks and require highly human labor to be reprogrammed by engineers, resulting increase in time costs and reduction in the fluency of hu-man-robot collaboration.

Due to the gaps, a cognitive cobot control system is proposed to improve and smooth the human-robot collaboration process. It integrates virtual and realistic task planning and dynamic guidance of visual data enhancing the intelligence of robots, facilitating information sharing with Augmented Reality and providing human-in-the-loop control approaches in a user-friendly manner to better fuse human operators' intelligence. With the deployment of the system, the percep-tion, reasoning, and cognition capabilities of the system are enhanced, including both the intelligence of industrial personnel and industrial robots.

(Information is provided by awardee)

Comments from Judging Panel:
It is a high-value and forward-looking self-developed cobot project at local universi-ty, which is in alignment with the re-industrialization of Hong Kong advocated by the Hong Kong SAR government.

Although the development is in the conceptual stage, the project has a fairly com-plete system that can be applied to different fields and fields in Hong Kong, and is compatible with the use of different industrial hardware.

It is believed that this project has high potential to become a very successful ex-ample, realizing local R&D in Hong Kong's industrial transformation, and leading the development of Hong Kong's Industry 5.0!