This effort will investigate the feasibility of a methodology to allocate functions to people and/or machines in manufacturing systems based upon the requirements of the tasks to be performed and the capability of each system. The methodology will involve a taxonomy of task characteristics and a taxonomy of characteristics of hyman and machine systems that are used to perform those tasks. The effort involves a cross-disciplinary approach in that it will integrate the technical state-of-the-art in flexible manufacturing systems with task analysis methods from the field of human factors engineering. The goal of the effort is to integrate the literatures from these two technicl areas and establish the feasibility of a methodology to match functional requirements with human and/or robotic capabilities.
