Intelligent Distributed Human Motion Simulation in Human-Robot Collaboration Environments

The manufacturing industry has been putting considerable research and development work into the implementation of hybrid teams consisting of workers, robots and assistance systems for several years. The production environment of the future will consist of hybrid teams of humans closely collaborating with robots and virtual agents. Hybrid teams require adaptive control, coordination of interactions between team members as well as reactive behavior for adapting production processes just in time and on demand e.g. when facing unexpected obstacles. In this paper we present a framework for 3D simulation of hybrid teams in production scenarios based on an agent framework and motion generation which can be used for evaluating critical properties of the planned production setting and dynamical assignment of tasks to team members. We illustrate the approach with a use case in which a human-robot team collaborates in a car manufacturing scenario.