Variations in cycle-time when using knowledge-based tasks for humans and robots

Paper in proceeding, 2021

Operator4.0 was coined in 2016 to create a research arena to understand how the physical, cognitive, and sensorial capabilities of an operator could be enhanced by automation. To create an interaction between operator and robots, there are important factors that needs to be defined. Two important factors are the task and function allocation. Without well-defined tasks it is hard to allocate the tasks between the robot and the human to create resource flexibility. Furthermore, it the tasks are knowledge-based rather than rule-based, the cycle time between operators can differ a lot. Two assumptions are discussed regarding knowledge-based tasks and automation. These are also tested in an experiment. Results show that it is a large variation of the cycle time for both humans (between 1,58 minutes up to 4,40 minutes) and robots (between 1,94 minutes up to 4,49 minutes) when it comes to knowledge-based and machine learning systems.