Effects of the Human Presence among Robots in the ARIAC 2023 Industrial Automation Competition

ARIAC is a robotic simulation competition promoted by NIST annually since 2017, aiming to present competitors’ with contemporary industry problems to be solved using agile robotics. For the 2023 competition, ARIAC competitors must perform assembly and kitting tasks by controlling four autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs), one floor-based robot, and one ceiling-based (Gantry) robot in an attempt to overcome a range of agility challenges in the supplied simulated environment, itself based on the Robot Operating System (ROS 2) and Gazebo. The 2023 competition also included a “human” agility challenge, comprising a (simulated) human operator working among robots on the factory floor. This development was motivated by the fact that, while robots and automation play an increasingly significant role in modern manufacturing, there still remains a close relationship between machines and humans. They should complement each other’s strengths and cover each other’s limitations while also observing any required safety rules. For example, the ISO standard “Robots and Robotic Devices – Collaborative robots” (ISO 15066:2016) prescribes the distances required between humans and robots. Within the ARIAC simulation environment, each human operator is controlled using autonomous Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents. At the same time, competitors can monitor the position of each human operator at any time by subscribing to the relevant ROS topic. In this article, we analyse the effects of this (simulated) human presence in the 2023 ARIAC competition and perform a detailed analysis of how the three different human personalities that were implemented affect the assembly tasks undertaken at the four different locations of the assembly stations. Given how the system is currently implemented, it appears that the influence of each encoded personality on the competitors is not as predictable as anticipated. We expand on why this may be a problem when addressing real collaborative spaces involving humans and industrial robots and the improvements that can be undertaken to mitigate the ensuing problems.