Humans Committed to Organisations and Work Transformations in the «Factories of the Future » through cobotisation – HECTTOR

Developping "Factories of the Future" implies to question work transformation and position of operators in their cooperation action with various technologies, such as cobots. The goal of this collaborative research project (PRC HECTTOR) - coupling ergonomics, sociology, anthropoly and process engineering - is to better understand technological, human and organizational issues of cobotization in small and medium-sized companies in France, with a prospective ambition. This focus on such companies is one of the originalities of our project, a second belongs to its origine as it is grounded in a COMUE HESAM initiative around "Factories of the Future" (the ECHINE project). To reach our objective, the project is structured around three tasks augmented by a valorization tasks. Anticipating and acting on the future implies to understand what is "already there" : the first three tasks deal with three complementary diagnosis (a social, political and technological diagonis, an organisational diagnosis and a diagnosis dealing with actual human-robot collaboration). These diagnosis will ground the construction of a prospective vision which concerns the development of management of transitions of work models. Impacts of the projects concern four main issues :
• Political and social issues. Our work will help in understanding in an holistic and systemic manner health and safety, training and transition of work management in "Factories of the Future", feeding this way political and social questions.
• Health and Safety, and training-skill management issues addressed through analysis of actual role of cobotization in relation to increasing/reducing of occupational health issues, training and enhancement of work. Indeed, introduction of cobots migth lead to enhance quality of work but can also lead to rigidification of work.
• Transition in work management issues leading to the development of more sustainable work and more agile organization. Our work will help to understand and act on the position of operators and their work in evolution of organizations. In which way, transition in work management models : are they grounded in actual participation of humans in decision and design processes? do support the development of a qualitative work? do create sustainable work conditions ?
• Technological issues related to possibilities of dynamic adaptation of design and production tools (e.g. simulation) and cobots to the diversity of situations that operators have to cope with, such as the evolutions of organizations. This implies to integrate human, health and safety, and organizational issues in early stages of design and transitions of work projects.
Results of the project will be valorized by publications in each discipline, such as a common publication following a seminar. This seminar will help in targetting a more broad academic and industrial audience, in particular small and medium-size companies.