Sophia
Socio-Physical Interaction Skills for Cooperative Human-Robot Systems in Agile Production
Project Description
The H2020-ICT10 project SOPHIA – Socio-physical Interaction Skills for Cooperative Human-Robot Systems in Agile Production – aims to create a new generation of core robotic technologies for socially cooperative human-robot systems. The objectives are to achieve a reconfigurable and resource-efficient production and improve human comfort and trust in automation, in hybrid human-plus-robot manufacturing environments.
SOPHIA core intelligence will enable timely, natural, and human-in-command interactions between humans and robots on both social (e.g., geometric reasoning and situation assessment; knowledge models for human-robot mixed teams; natural and multi-modal dialogue; and human-aware task planning) and physical (e.g., sharing physical loads) levels, representing the new concept of socio-physical interaction. Additionally, the design and development of novel under-actuated wearable exoskeletons and collaborative robots with high payload and advanced loco-manipulation capacities are central to the mechatronics developments of the SOPHIA project.
The role of SMIT
The research activities of SMIT focuses on the acceptance of exoskeletons and collaborative robots in the industrial workplace. We design new evaluation methods to assess exoskeletons and Human-Robot interaction from the end-user perspective.