Empowering Humans in a Cyber-Physical Production System: Human-in-the-loop Perspective

In the Industry 4.0 context, humans are taking up new roles in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) since it was realized that they constitute the most flexible part of an automated system. With this new reality, humans are becoming integral parts of CPS, entering in the realm of the Human-in-the-Loop of Cyber-Physical Systems (HiLCPS). In this paper, the challenges and technologies for the integration of humans in CPS environments are briefly discussed, and a practical application of the HiLCPS concept is presented. For this purpose, a human operation workbench is empowered with intelligent decision and assistant systems that use, among others, reasoning algorithms, image processing and speech recognition, to improve the productivity and quality of the tasks performed by humans, particularly focusing the assembly of highly customized products, as well as the training of operators to perform complex assembly, repairing or maintenance tasks.