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Abstract-Today's manufacturing and assembly systems have to be flexible to adapt quickly to an increasing number and variety of products, and changing market volumes. To manage these dynamics, several production concepts (e.g., flexible, reconfigurable, changeable or autonomous manufacturing and assembly systems) were proposed and partly realized in the past years. This paper presents the general principles of autonomy and the proposed concepts, methods and technologies to realize cognitive planning, cognitive control and cognitive operation of production systems. Starting with an introduction on the historical context of different paradigms of production (e.g., evolution of production and planning systems), different approaches for the design, planning, and operation of production systems are lined out and future trends towards fully autonomous components of an production system as well as autonomous parts and products are discussed. In flexible production systems with manual and automatic assembly tasks, human-robot cooperation is an opportunity for an ergonomic and economic manufacturing system especially for low lot sizes. The state-of-the-art and a cognitive approach in this area are outlined. Furthermore, introducing self-optimizing and self-learning control systems is a crucial factor for cognitive systems. This principles are demonstrated by a quality assurance and process control in laser welding that is used to perform improved quality monitoring. Finally, as the integration of human workers into the workflow of a production system is of the highest priority for an efficient production, worker guidance systems for manual assembly with environmentally-and situationally dependent triggered paths on state-based graphs are described in this paper.Note to Practitioners-Today's manufacturing enterprises have to face a number of challenges in a turbulent environment that originates amongst other from saturated markets, unprecedented and abrupt changes in market demands, an ever increasing number of product variants and smaller lot sizes. A recent research trend in Germany is the so called Cognitive Factory, where artificial cognitive capabilities are introduced to the control of production systems. The applications range from production planning and control, human-robot-cooperation, automatic robot programming to intuitive worker guidance systems.The concept of fully automated production systems is no longer a viable vision, as it has been shown, that the conventional automa- tion is not able to deal with the ever-rising complexity of modern production systems. Especially, a high reactivity, agility and adaptivity that is required by modern production systems, can only be reached by human operators with their immense cognitive capabilities, which enable them to react to unpredictable situations, to plan their further actions, to learn and to gain experience and to communicate with others. Thus, new concepts are required, that apply these cognitive principles to the planning processes and control systems of pr...

Recent findings in neuroscience suggest an overlap between brain regions involved in the execution of movement and perception of another’s movement. This so-called “action-perception coupling” is supposed to serve our ability to automatically infer the goals and intentions of others by internal simulation of their actions. A consequence of this coupling is motor interference (MI), the effect of movement observation on the trajectory of one’s own movement. Previous studies emphasized that various features of the observed agent determine the degree of MI, but could not clarify how human-like an agent has to be for its movements to elicit MI and, more importantly, what ‘human-like’ means in the context of MI. Thus, we investigated in several experiments how different aspects of appearance and motility of the observed agent influence motor interference (MI). Participants performed arm movements in horizontal and vertical directions while observing videos of a human, a humanoid robot, or an industrial robot arm with either artificial (industrial) or human-like joint configurations. Our results show that, given a human-like joint configuration, MI was elicited by observing arm movements of both humanoid and industrial robots. However, if the joint configuration of the robot did not resemble that of the human arm, MI could longer be demonstrated. Our findings present evidence for the importance of human-like joint configuration rather than other human-like features for perception-action coupling when observing inanimate agents.

The interaction of humans and robots has the potential to set new grounds in industrial applications as well as in service robotics because it combines the strengths of humans, such as flexibility and adaptability, and the strengths of robots, such as power and precision. However, for a successful interaction the safety of the human has to be guaranteed at all times. This goal can be reached by the use of specialised robot hardware but we argue that safety in human-robot interaction can also be done with regular industrial robots, if they are equipped with additional sensors to track the human's position and to analyse the human's verbal and non-verbal utterances, and if the software that is controlling the robot is especially designed towards safety in the interaction. For this reason, we propose three design principles for an increased safety in robot architectures and any other software component that controls a robot for human-robot interaction: robustness, fast reaction time, and context awareness. We present a robot architecture that is based on these principles and show approaches for speech processing, vision processing, and robot control that also follow these guidelines.

Abstract-Surgical tool tracking is an important key functionality for many high-level tasks in both robot-assisted and conventional minimally invasive surgery. Though the fields of application are similar in both surgery techniques (i.e. visually servoed instruments, workflow analysis or augmented reality), the kind of available information about the position and orientation of the surgical tool differ. In conventional laparoscopic surgery additional information to the images provides by the endoscopic camera can only be obtained by an external tracking system. In contrast, robotic systems provide angular informations from encoder readings that allow for a sufficient pose estimation and initialization of an image-based tracking algorithm. Our approach utilizes both encoder readings and visual information, in order to stabilize tracking in image space. The image-based tracking is supervised by means of the kinematic information and reinitialized in case of conflicting results. As tracking modality we utilize the Contracting Curve Density (CCD) algorithm that looks for maximal separation of local color statistics along the contour of a model.