The Manufacturing Assistant: safe, interactive teaching of operation sequences

In this paper we describe our Manufacturing Assistant, a mobile manipulator for future flexible manufacturing, and its capabilities for interactively learning new operation sequences. As an example we present a method for interactively teaching an order-picking task. The task is taught using a laser pointer and a hand-held computer. Furthermore, the system interacts with the user using speech output. The system was successfully demonstrated on the Hannover Industrial Fair 2002.