Human-Machine Collaboration: A Hybrid Workforce
The online publication Portugal Têxtil Online, a medium of Portuguese textile industry news, reports on the upcoming changes in the workplace, based on studies focused on the production settings of most textile factories. The initial reports pointed to a very disruptive situation that alienates human workers but following documents clarify that the future may rather be collaborative, allowing the workers to focus on certain tasks, while the robots perform the repetitive ones.
The example cited throughout the article is of CMU Portugal Program Principal Investigator and Carnegie Mellon University Professor Manuela Veloso, the creator of the CoBots, collaborative robots designed to ask for help with the tasks they cannot perform yet. This interaction between humans and robots can be able to generate acceptance and trust in the human user, and also free him or her from the more mundane or physically taxing tasks. The article describes the cases of some companies where humans ans machines already collaborate, Amazon and its warehouse robots and Fiat’s Italian branch Comau and Microsoft’s HoloLenses.
Read the Portuguese article at Portugal Têxtil Online (May 25, 2017)
