Viktor Rjabtšikov

The challenge in modern industry is to find the best ways for human-robot interaction in workplaces, enabling robots to realize optimal solutions by combining AI and human capabilities. The project's goal is to contribute to the automation of company production processes, focusing on the social and psychological aspects of human-robot collaboration to ensure that human workers in the industry feel safe and satisfied. Research directions include: - creating a collaborative robotics experimental lab - designing robotized workplaces - modelling of human-robot interaction, assessments and analysis of influencing factors and risks. Expected results are methodologies and validated human-robot interaction models, skills for their implementation, impact factors and risk assessments, a developed laboratory with hardware, software and expertise; providing user-centred design solutions services. All of this leads to safer human-robot interactions, increasing user trust in robotic systems.

Autonomous driving is no longer just an idea of technology vision, instead a real technical trend all over the world. The continuing development to a further level of autonomy requires more from energy optimization. The optimization of electric propulsion drive systems of self-driving electric vehicles by using autonomous and monitoring sensors are not often discussed. The goal of the proposal is to develop a specialized unsupervised prognosis and control platform for such energy system performance estimation. This goal requires the development of several test platforms and digital twins. A digital twin is composed of three components – the physical entities in the real world, their virtual models, and the connected data/view that ties the two worlds together.

Project goals Taking into account the relatively low automation and robotization of the traditional fossil fuels industry, a significant retraining is necessary for the workforce in transition to modern technological industrial sectors. This has to be done, in order for the potentially available workforce to meet the needs and requirements set by the modern mechatronics oriented industry, which actively implements the Industry 4.0 ideology. To meet those requirements, the project proposes retraining courses for the soon-to-be-available workforce. The topics covered by the retraining are electrical drives, automation, robotics, power electronics, and condition monitoring of industrial systems. These separate fields are strongly interconnected and overlapping, and together with the connection point of IT technologies, they can be considered the main technological pillars of modern mechatronics oriented industry.