ABSTRACT

Modern manufacturing systems require an increasingly agile production environment to adapt to a rapidly changing market demand, disruptions, and uncertainties to achieve efficient mass customization and to remain competitive. The flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a disruptive technology essential to achieving the new human-centric manufacturing paradigm, where human-robot/machine collaboration (HRC) contributes to increasing productivity and flexibility for today and future factories. In this presentation, I will present our recent works in addressing two challenges for HRC in FMS, namely robot programming/re-programming and decision making/adaptive control to coordinate various activities and production operations. I will introduce our work on robot learning from human demonstrations to reduce the programming/re-programming efforts such that non-robotic expert users can easily work with robots. In addition, intelligent decision making and coordinated control of robots/humans and schedule the production in a real-time fashion is critical for improving manufacturing efficiency, especially in mass customization environments. I will also introduce some of our works in this area.

BIO

Qing (Cindy) Chang is an Associate Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University of Virginia. She received her PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. Dr. Cindy Chang’s research has focused on dynamic manufacturing system modeling and simulation, data-enabled modeling and analysis, real-time production control, intelligent decision making and HRC. Dr. Chang has received the NSF CAREER award, been named as one of “20 most influential professors in smart manufacturing” by SME. She is a Fellow of ASME. She has served on numerous international/domestic conference/symposium organizing committees and chairmanships of technical committees/sessions for IEEE, ASME, and SME etc. She worked in General Motors Research & Development Center from 1997 to 2009, where she won the highest award in GM, General Motors Boss Kettering Awards, for 3 times for her research works in improving production efficiency and quality.