Smart and adaptive interfaces for INCLUSIVE work environment
Modern manufacturing systems are becoming more and more complex because of higher demands for fast production rate with high quality and flexibility, that is the ability to customize the production lines to the constantly changing market requests. Despite high levels of automation of machines and robots, humans remain central to manufacturing operations since they take charge of control and supervision of manufacturing activities. Human operators interact with machines and robots by means of human-machine interfaces (HMIs), which are unavoidably becoming very complex as new functions are implemented by the production system and include a wide range of possible operational modes and commands.
In this scenario, human operators experience many difficulties to interact efficiently with the machine; this is particularly true for middle age workers who feel uncomfortable in the interaction with a complex computerized system and young inexperienced or disabled people who cannot effectively manage such complex production systems.
To overcome this gap, INCLUSIVE aims to develop a new concept of interaction between the user and the machines in which the behavior of the automation system adapts to human operator capabilities.
INCLUSIVE is based on three pillars:
- Human capabilities measurement
- Adaptation of interfaces to human capabilities.
- Teaching and training the unskilled users.
The goal of the project is to develop an inclusive working environment to ensure the widest workers’ acceptance and productivity for new automatic production systems. To reach this goal, INCLUSIVE will develop an ecosystem of technological innovations driven by human factor analysis applied to three concrete industrial use cases coming from companies that produce or use automatic machines whose acceptance and productivity are strongly connected to system usability, personal characteristics and working environment comfort.