Supervised stowing as enabling technology for the integration of impaired operators in the industry

Nowadays, the number of jobs accessible to impaired people in industries is limited. However, minimum changes in the plant could allow the employment of such individuals. Technology is the way to assist such workers to perform at the best they could and to avoid disabilities to limit their potentialities. This work proposes a supervised stowing system that will allow impaired operators to perform the task of order-picking in cluttered environments, despite their disabilities. Pick and place is the most repetitive and common task in industrial manufacturing and warehouses, requiring complex cognitive skills for robots. In the proposed system, the task is physically executed by a robot, while the mental process of selecting the correct object to pick is demanded to the operator. This action is performed through an easy to use graphical user interface. An experimental campaign has been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed assistive robotic system.