Robotics

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Effective Human-Robot Teaming to Advance Aviation Manufacturing

The NASA University-Led Initiative project, titled, Effective Human-Robot Teaming to Advance Aviation Manufacturing, aims to transform manufacturing processes in the commercial aviation industry that have been resistant to automation. These manual processes have become significant bottlenecks in an increasingly efficient and automated production pipeline, while posing significant risk to the health and safety of human workers. This project seeks to improve the efficiency and ergonomics of these manual processes through the process-centered development of a flexible human-robot collaboration platform that will provide skilled aviation technicians with intelligent assistance. The UW Robotics Team is developing this platform and its applications across a range of manufacturing processes that are central and critical to the aerospace industry.

In this project, the UW Robotics team has partnered with The Boeing Company to situate the research in commercial aviation processes and to facilitate technology transfer into the industry.

Image credit: Lufthansa Technik AG 

Human-Robot Teaming in Aircraft Maintenance. Credit: Lufthansa Technik AG

The Team

  • Bilge Mutlu

    Sheldon B. and Marianne S. Lubar Professor, Computer Science

  • Michael Gleicher

    Professor, Computer Sciences

  • Robert Radwin

    Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering

  • Michael Zinn

    Professor, Mechanical Engineering

  • Emmanuel Senft

    Group Lead, IDIAP Research Institute

  • Mike Hagenow

    PhD Student

  • Pragathi Praveena

    PhD Student

Sponsors

  • NASA Aeronautics

The Robot


Publications

  1. Rakita, D., Mutlu, B., & Gleicher, M. (2017, March). A motion retargeting method for effective mimicry-based teleoperation of robot arms. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 361-370). PDF
  2. Pearce, M., Mutlu, B., Shah, J., & Radwin, R. (2018). Optimizing makespan and ergonomics in integrating collaborative robots into manufacturing processes. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 15(4), 1772-1784. PDF
  3. Subramani, G., Gleicher, M., & Zinn, M. (2018). Recognizing geometric constraints in human demonstrations using force and position signals. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(2), 1252-1259. PDF
  4. Rakita, D., Mutlu, B., & Gleicher, M. (2018, June). RelaxedIK: Real-time Synthesis of Accurate and Feasible Robot Arm Motion. In Robotics: Science and Systems. PDF
  5. Rakita, D., Mutlu, B., & Gleicher, M. (2019, June). Remote Telemanipulation with Adapting Viewpoints in Visually Complex Environments. In Proceedings of the Robotics: Science and Systems. PDF
  6. Praveena, P., Subramani, G., Mutlu, B., & Gleicher, M. (2019, March). Characterizing Input Methods for Human-to-robot Demonstrations. In 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 344-353). IEEE. PDF
  7. Senft, E., Hagenow, M., Welsh, K., Radwin, R., Zinn, M., Gleicher, M., & Mutlu, B. (2021). Task-Level Authoring for Remote Robot Teleoperation. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 302. PDF
  8. Hagenow, M., Senft, E., Radwin, R., Gleicher, M., Mutlu, B., & Zinn, M. (2021). Corrective shared autonomy for addressing task variability. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 6(2), 3720-3727. PDF
  9. Hagenow, M., Senft, E., Radwin, R., Gleicher, M., Mutlu, B., & Zinn, M. (2021). Informing real-time corrections in corrective shared autonomy through expert demonstrations. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 6(4), 6442-6449. PDF
  10. Senft, E., Hagenow, M., Radwin, R., Zinn, M., Gleicher, M., & Mutlu, B. (2021, October). Situated Live Programming for Human-Robot Collaboration. In The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 613-625). PDF
  11. Bhat, P., Senft, E., Zinn, M., Gleicher, M., Mutlu, B., Cook, R., & Radwin, R. G. (2021). Assessing limited visibility feedback for overhead manufacturing assembly tasks. Applied Ergonomics, 97, 103531. PDF
  12. Praveena, P., Molina, L., Wang, Y., Senft, E., Mutlu, B., & Gleicher, M. (2022, March). Understanding Control Frames in Multi-Camera Robot Telemanipulation. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 432-440). PDF


Project Images

UW NASA ULI Team
UW NASA ULI Team

More Projects

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