Augmented Humans with Mixed Reality and Artificial Intelligence Solutions

Dear Colleagues,

Today, after nearly a century, people have examples of robots playing a relevant role in their lives, such as automated vacuum cleaners, entertainment or toy robots, or flying drones. However, the largest market share is for industrial robots, which are usually programmed to carry out physical production work without the need for human activity. In recent decades, technological growth has focused primarily on automation per se rather than collaboration with human work. It has generated a clash between robots and human workers, where the latter, especially those performing low-level tasks, fear being replaced by the former.

Industry 4.0 aims to overcome this situation. In a society where the demand for skilled workers is increasing, innovative technologies can provide skilled professionals in less time, increasing the flexibility of work, decreasing the possibility of making mistakes, increasing job security, and keeping up-to-date. Emerging and immersive technologies include Mixed Reality (MR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. With the right choice of these technologies, work sessions can be simplified, remaining more intuitive and with continuous supportive feedback if needed. The operator will not be replaced but will receive a useful tool to enhance his senses, cognitive abilities, and actions. In this context, robots will serve operators and not replace them. This new approach puts the human being back at the center of Industry. Moreover, with increasing access to large amounts of data, there is a growing need for professionals who analyze and interpret that data to derive insights that can lead to informed and beneficial decisions. The large adoption of such technologies also raises the question about the safety of human workers collaborating with robots or sharing their workspace, since MR and AI may fail or give inaccurate results that may lead the user to unsafe situations. Therefore, not only the accuracy of proposed systems should be evaluated, but also their uncertainty as a whole pipeline, not limiting the issue to the predictive algorithm.

We solicit submissions of high-quality original research papers on any aspect and application that aims to restore the human role in different fields. This can be achieved through the correct choice of emerging technologies and enslaved robots, taking into account the uncertainty of measurements in the whole pipeline. One example would be the use of MR interfaces to enhance the human-robot interaction and their control in shared spaces or the use of AI solutions to predict human intention and guide the operator through Augmented Reality simulations.

Dr. Alessandro Luchetti
Dr. Mariolino De Cecco
Guest Editors

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• MR in Industry 4.0
• human digital twin
• MR and AI for training and support
• human-machine collaboration
• MR and AI for Safety
• measurement science