Siemens: Getting Robots and Workers to Cooperate

Like that this approach is addressing elements and architecture of process, and that the design and operation of  these elements is also a big part of doing something intelligently.  New component elements of business process modeling?   Looking deeper.

This AI Factory Boss Tells Robots And Humans How To Work Together  in FastCompany.

Siemens’s future “artificially intelligent” factory is aimed at a new trend in automation: telling robot and human workers how to help each other make things.

Robots are consistent, indefatigable workers, but they don’t improvise well. Changes on the assembly line require painstaking reprogramming by humans, making it hard to switch up what a factory produces. Now researchers at German industrial giant Siemens say they have a solution: a factory that uses AI to orchestrate the factory of the future, by both programming factory robots and handing out assignments to the humans working alongside them.

“Instead of programming [each robot], what we do is say, this is a machine that can do this [task], this is a machine that has the following capabilities,” says Florian Michahelles, who heads the Siemens Web of Things research group in Berkeley, CA. An AI program that Michahelles and his team have developed, called a “reasoner,” figures out the steps required to make a product, such as a chair; then it divides the assignments among machines based their capabilities, like how far a robotic arm can reach or how much weight it can lift.  ...  "