"There are a large number of accidents that are happening every day due to carelessness -- most of them, unfortunately, from human errors," said lead author Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, assistant professor in Washington State University's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. "Robots act as planned and follow the rules, but the humans often don't follow the rules. That's the most difficult and challenging problem."
"We defined the carelessness, and the robot observed the behavior of the human and tried to understand it," he said. "The notion of carelessness level is something new. If we know which human is inattentive, we can do something about that."
In computerized simulations of packaging and assembly lines where humans and robots work together, the algorithm developed to account for human carelessness improved safety by about a maximum of 80% and efficiency by about a maximum of 38% compared to existing methods.
Most computer programs help robots react when a mistake happens. Those algorithms might focus either on improving efficiency or safety, but they haven't considered the changing behavior of the people they're working with, said Hosseinzadeh.
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