A Novel Integrated Industrial Approach with Cobots in the Age of Industry 4.0 through Conversational Interaction and Computer Vision
Authors: Andrea Pazienza, Nicola Macchiarulo, Felice Vitulano, Antonio Fiorentini, Marco Cammisa, Leonardo Rigutini, Ernesto Di Iorio, Achille Globo, Antonio Trevisi (Exprivia S.p.A., QuestIT S.r.l., 2019)
Topic: Chatbots and Dialogue Systems

Abstract
From robots that replace workers to robots that serve as helpful colleagues, the field of robotic automation is experiencing a new trend that represents a huge challenge for component manufacturers. The contribution starts from an innovative vision that sees an ever closer collaboration between Cobot, able to do a specific physical job with precision, the AI world, able to analyze information and support the decision-making process, and the man able to have a strategic vision of the future.

Introduction
In the last century, the manufacturing world has adopted solutions for the advanced automation of production systems. Today, thanks to the evolution and maturity of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), new generation networks, and the growing adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) approach, a new paradigm emerges, aiming at integrating the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) with business processes, thus opening the doors to the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) and that will allow us to join in the era driven by information and further handled with cognitive computing techniques (Wenger, 2014). Robots and humans have been co-workers for years, but rarely have we been truly working together. This may be about to change with the rise of Collaborative Robotics (Colgate et al., 1996). Collaborative Robots (better known as Cobots) are specifically designed for direct interaction with a human within a defined collaborative work-space, i.e., a safeguard space where the robot and a human can perform tasks simultaneously during an automatic operation. Then, human-robot collaboration fosters various levels of automation and human intervention. Tasks can be partially automated if a fully automated solution is not economical or too complex. Therefore, manufacturers may benefiting from the rising of AI-driven automation, and the progress of Adaptable End Effectors devices, mounted at the end of Cobot’s arms, may help to perform specific intelligent tasks (Dubey and Crowder, 2002). The way in which Cobots and humans interact, exchanging and conveying information, is fundamental. The key role in this landscape would be addressed by Conversational Interfaces (Zue and Glass, 2000), which exploit and take advantages from the recent achievements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), to understand user need and generate the right answer or action. In this scenario, Computer Vision also plays an important role in the process of creating collaborative environments between humans and robots. Systems of this type are already introduced into the industry to facilitate tasks of product quality control or component assembly inspection. By giving vision to a robot, it can make it able to understand the industrial environment that surrounds it and can improve the execution of tasks in support to other people. Improving robots software with AI will be key to making robots more collaborative. The work starts from an innovative vision that beholds, in the future, an ever closer collaboration between Cobot, able to do a specific physical job with precision and without alienation, the AI world, able to analyze, process, and learn from information and support the decision-making process, and the employee able to have a strategic vision of the future. To validate its effectiveness, a collaborative environment between employee, Cobot and AI systems has been crafted to make possible the three subjects communicate in a simple way and without requiring the employee to have specific skills to interact with the Cobot and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Our contribution is indeed placed in this scenario where the convergence of multiple technologies allows us to define a new approach related to the management of a core business process (e.g. shipments) which tends to ensure more and more flexibility of the process thanks to a simplification of human interaction with Cyber-Physical Systems, with a better coordination between the physical world (the packaging line), and that of IT processes (the ERP model). In the belief that the complexity of new industrial production systems requires interdisciplinary skills, our intents are to bring together knowledge from related disciplines such as computational linguistics, cognitive science, machine learning, computer vision, humanmachine interaction, and collaborative robotics automation towards an integrated novel approach specifically designed for the smart management of a manufacturing process line by fostering and strengthening the synergy and the interaction between robot and human. Our research is broadly situated in HumanRobot Collaboration (HRC), a promising robotics discipline focusing on enabling robots and humans to operate jointly to complete collaborative tasks. Recent works tried to figure out in which way Cobots may help humans in collaborative industrial tasks (El Zaatari et al., 2019) or in participatory design in fablabs (Ionescua and Schlunda, 2019). An inital study centered cobots in advanced manufacturing systems (Djuric et al., 2016). No or litte work (Ivorra et al., 2018) is done to endow Cobots with cognitive intelligence like conversational interaction and computer vision. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the functionalities and the architecture of our approach, focusing on the main four technological aspects: cobots, adaptable end effectors, conversational interfaces, and computer vision. Section 3 describes the possible scenarios of application specifically designed for our approach, such as Smart Manufacturing. Finally, Section 4 discusses the proposed framework and concludes the paper, outlining future works.

Conclusion
In line with the main objectives, we contributed to the development and validation of a framework in an operational environment of intelligent robotic systems and HRC. In particular, we dealt with conversational interaction technologies useful to perform: (i) high-performance linguistic analysis services based on NLP technologies; (ii) models for the symbiotic human-robot interaction management; (iii) services and tools for the adaptation of linguistic interfaces with respect to user characteristics. The Cobots are close to operating in environments where the presence of man plays a key role. A fundamental characteristic is therefore the Cobot’s ability in reacting to textual and vocal commands to properly understand the user’s commands. The Cobot’s perception is leveraged with its ability to detect object and understand what there is around him; computer vision processing becomes crucial to the extent of giving Cobots a cognitive profile. We therefore envision our framework to be fully operable in complex manufacturing systems, in which the collaboration between robot and man is facilitated by advanced AI and cognitive techniques. We showed how, already today, it is possible to “humanize” highly automated processes through a Cobot, collecting and integrating the operational information in the corporate knowledge base. In fact, we believe that in the long term there will be a convergence between automation, AI and IoT, allowing the market to create a full “Digital Twin” with an organization that will lead to a strong automation of organizational choices driven by data collected in the field. The digitized organization can then be equipped with its own “Company Brain”, an AI able to make autonomous complex decisions aimed at maximizing a business goal that, working in a cooperative manner with the company management, will be able to respond much more precisely and quickly to changes in an increasingly unstable and fluid market.