This Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) project advances the vision of robots that work alongside workers to augment human activities, create better working conditions, provide more job satisfaction, open new employment prospects, and result in greater productivity than manual labor or automation alone. Existing principles and methods for work design and automation often use robots to displace human workers and are inherently limited in their economic and social benefits. This research advances a model of robots as physical assistants, working in partnership with human workers to redefine human work. The objective is to create a "matchmaking" process to identify human-robot pairings that can significantly improve productivity, health, and safety, while maximizing human labor resources. A multidisciplinary approach is applied to existing manual tasks in the manufacturing sector that show high potential to benefit from the integration of collaborative robots, in order to gain a better understanding of the impact of teaming humans and intelligent robotic assistants at the individual, operations, and socioeconomic levels. Finally, the insight gained from investigating current job characteristics, worker skills, and robot capabilities, is applied to enhance the benefits of the next generation of manufacturing robots for the strength of the economy and the quality of life of the workforce.
This research aims to provide an increased understanding of how human capabilities can be augmented and enhanced using collaborative robots for physical or cognitive work; a new computational framework to optimally match work characteristics and skills, human capabilities, and robot augmentations; innovative economic models of, and policy recommendations for, the transformation of human employment across industries through human-robot collaboration; and insight into how the next generation of robot systems should be designed. Existing manufacturing sector jobs and tasks that show high potential to benefit from the integration of collaborative robots will be studied to understand how human-robot pairings can significantly improve economic productivity, and worker health and safety. The technical challenges in human-robot teaming are considered in the larger context of worker wellbeing and production as well as the substitutability between labor and robotics, changes in demand for labor skills, and the response in labor demand and supply when technology changes for a specific process. The project includes laboratory simulations and expert review to validate the optimized human-robot work plans, and recommendations on how the next generation of robot systems should be designed to further augment human capabilities and productivity in work.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
