The Human Dynamics of Robots

Everything will stay different

In 2016, 3 years ago, Fraunhofer Institute in Germany demonstrated the way an employee could work together with a Robot on an assembly cell without a safety barrier. They organized workshops addressed questions posed by a variety of interest groups. The workshops also presented the first scenarios of what human-robot collaboration might be like in the year 2030. Today, 2019, we know that this future will be much more near than we think. This future is happening today. Not only in laboratory environments, like during my visit of the University of Munich (photo below) but also in real live I have visited numerous manufacturing plants of Global companies which are currently implementing Collaborative Robot-Human activities and workplaces. Reflecting on this acceleration of technology, I have asked myself 3 questions I want to discuss in this article.

1. Who has control, who is responsible and who can (temporary) stop any autonomated process?
2. How will a robot impact the Human Integrity and Privacy?
3. How predictive or prescriptive will both be for each other? Are we ready to have a Robot as our new 'Boss'? Receiving orders, checks and appraisals from a machine?

Control and Responsibility

If we visualize a 'Robot' we always see something like the friendly red/grey iron friend in the first picture, who embraces the human physically even with 'eyes' on a screen. (The eyes by the way seem more trustful than camera's for most people, which is from a technological perspective at least questionable ;) The robot today manifests often as software, combined with algorithms (and/or artificial intelligence) which takes decisions for us. My Nest controller at home learns when I am upstair or downstairs or not at home. Based on this he autonomously determines what temperature it should be in my house. By geofence (the GPS in my iPhone) it will know when I am on my way home, autonomously deciding to put the temperature down. (I live in Miami, so my desired temperature will seldom be 'up'...). In case of lights or temperature both the process and the consequence are pretty harmless. But imagine: Me in my Tesla, which I fully trust driving and braking autonomously, has at some point decided to hit either a little boy on the right side of the street or a woman on the left side of the street and it's algorithm is learned to choose always the younger person. The woman on the left side is my wife in this fictive example and the boy was not a boy but a small dog standing on his hind legs.... I obviously would choose for the dog to hit instead of my wife if I would be able to override the Tesla's algorithm. Who should be responsible in the case the car decides? Elon Musk, who designed the car? Or me, who was behind the steering wheel? Do we always want to be in control as humans, knowing that based on statistics humans make on average worse choices than robots? And we find it ethical that a mistake like described is just 'collateral damage' for the better in the bigger picture?

If we translate this example to the shop floor in our industry: Do we want to own the 'red' button (to stop/intervene in an autonomated process) in our collaboration with Robots? Today most of the robots we know are 'just' mechanized aides who execute repetitive tasks too heavy or to complex or too repetitative for humans. But what if Robots think with us? Anticipate for us? Predict us? And decide way faster than we are ever able to do? What will then be the function of this 'Red button'? And who has in that case the real responsibility in the process and for the consequences?

Integrity and Privacy

People with non/partly-fitting-capabilities will benefit a lot of the upcoming Robot+Human era. I do not talk about people with disabilities because in my view technological solutions will almost totally enable our total population to work. Autonomated Exoskeletons will enable people to fulfill tasks today are impossible. Like in the picture below showing a paralyzed man walking again, but in work life giving part of the control to an autonomated robot, designed for the work process.

We are about to benefit from future opportunities opened up by new robotics solutions, the way robots and people interact needs adjusting. Reexamining tools, data displays and working processes is just as essential as answering questions relating to user behavior and workplace safety. Bosch, for example, is developing solutions that enable people with severe disabilities to work with mobile manufacturing assistants. And analysis of the findings will also allow people to derive ways in which robots can support employees with mild or no disabilities. "Currently there is a lot learning to share from people with severe disabilities so we can improve human-robot interaction. What we're doing allows us to take a much closer look at just what requirements a manufacturing assistant has to fulfill," according to Bosch project manager Wolfgang Pomrehn. In the long term, this will mean employees without disabilities will also benefit from additional support from mobile manufacturing assistants support that can be tailored to the requirements of each individual employee. But this means that the 'Robot' is able to determine how is 'human' is working with him. Disability and Capability are very close to each other. Maybe when I am not tagged as disabled, a robot can still 'assess' me as 'partly incapable'. Is this incapability an incident? Or is it structural? What is the reason or background of this incapability? Will the robot snitch to my boss? What if I had an accident with my mountainbike last weekend? Will the robot advice me to look for another hobby? How far will the 'cobot' relation go and invade my private zone?

My new Boss: Co Bot

More importantly, the entire concept of the Cobot is more than cooperation and ability to work in close proximity to humans. It's about collaborating together in a joint task, activity or process. Cobots are aimed at Augmenting, Improving or Replacing what humans do, in order to make humans more Effective, Efficient or Enhanced. In that process, Robots and Robots are already replacing humans where possible. There are still people who think that this will be not the case. This will be a matter of time in my view. Yes, there will be an area of new useful work, but the total available amount of job offerings will be dramatically lower if even only all repetitative labour is replaced by bots. A matter of 3 elements:

1. Processors speed (to drive multiple advanced analytics simultaneously)
2. Artificial Intelligence maturity (to enable autonomous processing of advanced autonomous algorithms and data analytics)
3. Creating of hypersensitive Sensors (in order to enable IoT micro sensors to enhance Robot senses in terms of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling)

The data storage or network bandwidth is already not a bottleneck anymore in most of the developed regions. But the interaction between robots and humans is crucial in the path forward in human-robot collaboration. Today, even advanced digital assistants such as Alexa are unable to have a two way interaction by voice. Cobots will need all 5 senses to utilize in an optimal way all communication channels with people. Companies see much greater adoption with cobots working alongside humans than they do with robots that are meant to replace their activities. Step by step, in line with the technological progress, the cobot will step by step be enabled to give orders, direct, lead and dictate. More accurate, direct and to the point we have ever been able to do. Smelling fear, Hearing our complaints to our fellow co-workers, Seeing our quality of work and Telling us to speed up our work. There will be nothing, driven by technological possibilities and performance opportunities, to stop that process of development we are in today.

Humanoid future

Unfortunately, given the hyper-flexibility of automation, this suggests that future cobot designs might more carefully mimic ordinary human movement. Potentially, the future might see smarter, more human Cobots. Adaptive interaction will become ubiquitous in the next few years. But advances in neurotechnology are promising much greater things.

For nearly a decade, researchers have been successfully reading the tiny electrical signals that constitute the brain’s thoughts. Early experiments demonstrated that images could be recreated solely by reading the brain’s activity, and more recent tests reveal a startling capacity to control machines with nothing more tangible than thought.

The key to this tech is the Brain Computer Interface, a non-invasive wearable that measures brain activity and translates it into a language a computer can understand. In the world of robotics, this tech may soon allow prosthetic limbs that function much as their biological counterparts do, driven only by their users thought to move. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has published a paper revealing the results of a closed-loop test of the ability of Rethink Robotic’s Baxter Robot to learn from a human observer’s observation of its errors.

Perhaps as a natural part of our ability to learn through trial and error, our brains produce a an error-related potential signal when we see a mistake being made, whether it’s our own or someone else’s. This tiny signal is detected by a wearable Brain-Computer-Interfaces within milliseconds, immediately providing feedback to the cobot. The Robot in your Brain. Super Effective, highly Efficient and very Enhanced. But will it create a better world for us Humans?

Neil C.W. Webers, Executive Vice President Americas, EFESO Consulting

You can respond by LinkedIn or send an email to me directly from Human to Human: [email protected]

Sources:

• Fraunhofer-Institut für Arbeitswirtschaft und Organisation IAO
• Reliableplant.com, Jonathan Wilkins
• Cognitiveworld.com, Ronald Schmelzer
• Roboticsbusinessreview.com, Richard van Hooijdonk