Attentive Machines: Man and Machines in ICT based Production Systems of the Future

Future ICT based manufacturing systems aim at a radical individualization of products (Lot-size 1) under the condition of highly flexible mass production environments. A key challenge towards such systems is the confluent collaborative cooperation between man and machines. This project aims at attention-aware self-adaptive machines pacing the interaction with human workers based on observed user attention and task performance, and up-to-the minute adaption of the level of assistive support provided to human workers during the manufacturing process. A reference implementation of attentive machines based on (i) formal models of human attention, (iii) multisensory recognition architectures and (iii) embedded subtle assistive support mechanisms will be empirically evaluated with two cases of Austrian manufacturing excellence.