Industry 5.0 – Huizhong Cao, Henrik Söderlund & Greta Braun // #SFTF

So hello everyone, we are here from Chalmers University in Gothenburg in Sweden and we are three PhD students doing research about production and so we're looking at how is industry changing and how do people work in factories but also the people surrounding factories so the planners and engineers.

How will we work in the future, who of you here are scared of this question, are you scared?

No, okay, that's nice, you're not scared of this question.

I think we are not scared either because we work a lot with this.

There is a lot of people who are scared because a lot of tasks will maybe not be done by us humans anymore and a lot of tasks will be done by our robot colleagues or other robots and will be automized by different solutions.

So before we look into the future and how we will work in the future, we would like to take you on a little ride through history because actually throughout industry's history work has changed before.

If we look at the first industrial revolution, we went from doing everything manually to actually being able to letting machines produce power so that human power was not needed as much anymore.

People were scared back then as well, they were scared to lose their jobs, but actually it made work better for them.

So throughout every industrial revolution, which I will show you a little bit more about, the work conditions improved and also we had more prosperity.

So actually through every industrial revolution work became a little bit better and we hope that it's the same now as well.

So steam power led to being able to use the power and not the strong force of humans anymore.

Then the electricity came and we could actually have conveyor belts, for example, that transport different things through the factories and also, what we maybe not think so much about, but also it made it possible to work at night.

So we could work in shifts and become even more efficient.

In the third industrial revolution, the computers came and also electronics, which made it possible to also use a lot of amounts of data to do smart things with that.

In the fourth industrial revolution, actually it was coined in Germany, 2011, at the Hanover Fair, since 2011 we talk about this industry 4.0, which maybe some of you have heard about, where everything is about connecting sensors and having digital twins where we can see everything in a virtual environment as well to make smarter decisions, to be able to maintain our factories in a better way, and use large amounts of data to make smarter decisions, to prevent production stops and plan better for the future.

But now we are in a very complex world, which is why the European Commission saw a need to coin a new paradigm for industry, which is called Industry 5.0.

They say that we are facing in industry a lot of disruptions like war and pandemics and natural catastrophes, so we have to become more resilient, first of all, to these disruptions.

But also of course we are facing climate change, so we need to become sustainable, we need to have a sustainable way of producing things and also consuming things.

And we need to do it in a human-centric way because the humans are key to actually drive this transformation, so we need to have conditions in the factories and in production that humans want to work there and provide them with the right tools and skills.

So what does it mean for us as humans?

I think one important thing is to be able to adapt to this changing world, and my grandfather actually is quite an inspiration when it comes to that.

I asked him how it was for him to work as an architect back in the days, and he showed me the tools he was using, and I did not recognize these tools actually, even though it's maybe like 40 years ago, but only in 40 years so much changes.

This is a logarithmic calculator that you can use to make logarithmic calculations.

And then, same person, my grandfather, came to visit us at work a couple of years ago, and he tried out virtual reality, and he was so amazed, and he was like, oh my god, if I would have had this when I was an architect back in the days, it would have helped me so much.

Because then I could have felt how does the building feel when I walk into it, and how do I make, how could I make some changes to improve the experience?

So I think being very curious and being willing to learn new things is one important skill to have in this changing environment.

But it is very difficult, because the jobs that we do today don't look the same in five years.

Actually studies by the British Council show that half of the jobs that today's students will do in the future don't yet exist.

And also the World Economic Forum, they do these big investigations of employers and employees in the world, and they found that 44% of employees' skills, all of our skills, 44% of them will change in the next years.

So it actually impacts all of us.

On top of that, we also have a demographic change in Europe, especially Germany, Italy, and Poland, but also Spain, also in Sweden.

We have huge demographic shifts, China as well, and the US.

For example, in Sweden, the situation looks like that, that we have half as many 20 to 25-year-olds in Stockholm and Gothenburg region compared to 30 to 35-year-olds, half as many.

So we will not have so many people, which is also an important factor to consider how we will work in the future.

Of course, we will hopefully improve how we can include people from other continents in our job market, but still, we will have this skill shortage in our countries to deal with.

So how do we grow in a world where the only constant is change?

We did a study and we looked at which are the stakeholders that need to take action to actually be able to work against this skill gap that is right now widening.

So it is mainly the individuals themselves, so you and me, who need to take action.

So we need to see how is our work changing, what new tasks will we do, what are the skills that we need to learn.

So this is sort of the outer circle here.

But then there is a really strong need that there is a support system, and this support system needs to have a common understanding of what are the skills that are needed.

So where are we going?

And it's very important that these four stakeholders that we identified need to collaborate.

So it's the employers, of course, because they are the ones that transform the business.

So for example, for us in our region, Volvo Cars, right now they have a big transformation towards electrification of cars, and also the trucks.

And becoming more sustainable and digitalizing the production.

So those are the ones, they need to set these goals and tell the rest of the world.

Obviously the educators, the universities, but also other education providers that can then provide the right courses that the employees need to take.

And then the research community and also policy makers can support this by giving the right incentives and by supporting the collaboration.

So this is a picture to show how can we bridge the skill gaps in industry.

We are also talking about connected to industry 5.0, the operator 5.0.

So the person working in the shop floor.

And we are referring to a paper here from Romarin Star, it's quite famous, where it's about how can operators on the shop floor work towards this industry 5.0.

So resilience, sustainability, and human centric.

By actually using augmentation tools.

So how can you use, for example, exoskeletons to be a super strong operator.

And to be a virtual operator that can use augmented reality to make smarter decisions.

A healthy operator by using different sensors and, for example, smart watches to be sustainable in your own work life and feel good, have a well functioning balance.

How can you make smarter decisions?

So this is the smart operator using smart tools and seeing the data in specific ways, being able to analyze it in the best way.

Then the operator that can collaborate with collaborative robotics.

Trying to find the best allocation of tasks.

So what am I good at?

What is the robot good at?

And then also lastly, being connected.

Being connected with the system and getting most of the data.

Yeah.

So that was all from my side so far.

And I'm gonna give over to Henrik.

And I think I forgot that we said that we should introduce ourselves in the beginning.

So maybe we can do that now.

That I give over.

So we are all three from Chalmers University in Gothenburg in Sweden.

Which is a very big university in Sweden.

And we work in a department called production systems focusing on human centric production and future of work.

So my research is about the skill gaps in industry and how we can bridge them.

And I'm gonna� Yes.

We are really, really honored to have you here.

My name is Huizhong Cao.

And I'm studying at� before I studied architecture for seven years.

And now because I see the future work like architecture is about how can we bring this kind of virtual space to the daily life rather than we only build the physical space because of the circular economy, also the sustainability issues.

We consume too much materials.

So now we work mostly extended reality and how this can help with boost the confidence.

Optimize your cognitive load where you want to learn new skills.

And today we will introduce the social robot as one way.

It's not extended reality.

But it's like extended brain workforce.

So it can teach you as a virtual mentor where you do some task.

Yes.

Thanks again.

Okay.

Hi, guys.

And I'm also a Ph.D. student in the same team as Greta and Huizhong.

Also working with how we can augment the future workforce.

And especially with the extended reality devices.

And I'm actually gonna correct Greta a bit.

It's not the three of us on stage.

We also have our fourth and newest colleague in the team.

This is Sia, our social robot.

She's also part of our team, I should say.

And the team that I'm referring to, we are part of the Stena Industry Innovation Lab in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Here we conduct research on industry 5.0 concepts.

We look into how do we augment the future workforce.

And that workforce being in production.

And we do this looking into different kinds of technologies.

So digital twin simulation tools to work more virtually with virtual training, augmentation.

We also do this through robot interactions.

So using industrial robots, co-bots, and so forth.

And then, of course, with AI and cognitive information design.

And the lab itself, it's an open arena where we invite industry and collaborators to join us in research projects, in workshops, in different kind of studies that we carried out with these new technologies.

So overall, we have had over 200 industrial partners participating in our workshops and workshops.

And it's also open for education.

So we invite everyone from kindergarten to academia, but also industry to come to the lab and partake in our education.

And then, of course, we also foster research projects.

And we have by now 20, more or less, 25 PhDs that graduated from this lab.

And the facility of the lab is a 300 square meter area.

It was actually a former library, but I guess not that many students from the university actually read the physical books.

So we decided to make it into a lab instead.

So we try to replicate actual physical production systems within the lab.

So we have a full-scale car body where we can do research on how to work in automotive assembly, how to use robots in a large extent to automate that kind of work.

We also have a full-scale drone factory.

So everything from 3D printing the parts into logistics and final assembly through a conveyor system.

And then, of course, we have a virtual version of the lab as well.

So we work with digital twins.

So everything in the lab should be connected to a digital copy where we can carry out virtual training and simulations.

And just to tease you guys a bit, we're going to show some of the demonstrators that we have done, some of the studies connected to the different kind of 5.0 operators that Greta talked about.

So for the first one, the augmented operator, using kind of smart glasses, AR devices, we can really give our operators like superhuman power.

They could have x-ray vision.

So you can look into a product.

You can see the wiring.

You can see the drawings.

You can see exactly where to place the electrical harness, in this case.

We can also use it for cognitive instruction.

So you can have a really new operator coming into a workplace, never seen the product before, never seen instructions, but through these visual guidelines, it's quite easy to follow along and quite easily ramp up your experience.

You can become an experienced operator in more or less no time.

So instead of going into paper instructions, you now have these visual aids right in front of you.

And moving on, we also work with the, let's see, next slide, we also work with collaborative robots.

And here we call this operator the collaborative operator.

So how do we work together with robots and other coworkers?

So we really try to test out these concepts, both working side-by-side a human on the workstation being an aid for us.

So here we can see a robot collecting material.

So handling the logistics for the workstation and really with this, we can really increase the quality.

We can increase the efficiency of the station as well.

The robot will pick exactly the same right quantity at the correct time.

We can also use it to automate some of the more unergonomic tasks, some of the more repetitive.

So in this case, entering screws, which is really harmful for the human being, by having a robot working side-by-side, then we can relay this task onto the robots.

And we can also work on the same product with a robot in close vicinity.

Yeah.

Yes, so I will continue introducing the virtual training, as we mentioned before.

We use extended reality now as a way to help us to gamify our learning process, even industry and manufacturing.

And so you can see, we can have a physical mock-up of the real environment stuff and then have the interactions with the handles of the Oculus 3.

And then we can do this by connecting this to even the virtual button to the real button, like the real physical systems.

So you can see, this is our drone factory as a setup.

And when I click the virtual buttons in the Emry 3D, this commercial software, this virtual commissioning works and start to move the conveyor belts when I click the virtual buttons.

So in this case, there have been a lot of work and scenarios we need to test and validate what kind of benefits this could bring us.

Is this help with our learning outcomes as well?

Or it helps with virtual commissioning better for us to implement human-robot interactions in the future?

There are a lot of things we want to investigate.

And also you can see from the picture, this is our lab environment.

So in this kind of physical systems, we have integrated so many different topics.

So now we have seen the digital twins, is to connect the physical ones and the virtual ones to enable the real-time connectivities of the data transformations and to enable this kind of virtual commissioning functionalities.

But also we have this drone factory as you see, we bring one product from these drones.

Actually, this is a production line, so you can have five operators at the different assembly stations.

So you're passing by each of the semi-products and in the end, it should turn out to be perfect ones.

And then we have the 2D digital screens, but also we want to explore using AR and also the social robot, which way is the best efficient way.

So we can test in different methods of doing the instruction designs, information designs.

How can we make it the best learning outcome from this different experiment?

And today we would like to introduce our colleague, fur hat.

We call it Sia.

So this robot, it has so many different voices and the faces, and it's connected to chat GPT, GPT-4 and 4.0.

And so we put our instruction beforehand to let it to digest, okay, so what is the instruction we need to assemble these drones?

And now if we interact with it, it will tell me how to do this in a way I can understand at my beginner level in this case.

So we can have a try now.

Yes.

Hello.

How are you?

Hello.

How are you?

I'm a beginner.

For our drone assembly, what should I do today?

Hello.

Firstly, start by attaching the four legs to the drone assembly.

They're to be placed in the outer holes.

Correctly attached legs make a click sound.

Nice.

I have done the first step.

What should I do, the second step?

For the second step, rotate the drone and place it back on the fixture with the legs facing down in the hollowed out areas.

Ensure it's in the upright position.

Okay.

Now I have done the second step.

I'm looking forward to my third step now.

Now pick up the battery from the fixture and place it inside the drone in the indicated position.

Make sure the wires line up towards the drone's connections.

Take a break.

What do you think?

That's perfectly fine.

Make sure to register your absence in the system.

Enjoy your lunch and rejuvenate yourself for the rest of the day.

Okay.

It's a very short demo.

So we show this demo because we think in the future this kind of a way of like as a mentorship, like you can chat with this and you can kind of customize the way to provide your information.

It may be good at a different age level where you have a, for example, in battery production, so we have a lot of new operators.

Some of them have already very long experience in the car automotive industry, but some of them are just high school students.

So we are looking forward to a way like instead of only visual like graphics information designs, we want to introduce like a more human-centric dialogue that is a virtual mentor.

So it will help us like our future generations to get easier to understand the content.

Yeah.

We want to, yes.

Thank you all for joining our presentations.

Yeah, if you would like to talk to this, actually it can chat much more than what I have done before.

Anyone want to try to talk to this guy?

Yeah.

Yes.

We can do it afterwards as well.

So, yes.

So, if someone wants to join on the stage, we can do that very soon.

Maybe we just round up what we're going to talk and then you can take off your headphones and come here if you want.

So maybe just thanking our funding that we're getting from a Swedish project called Imprenuer 4.0.

So if someone is interested in upskilling, this is a program created by 13 Swedish universities, actually, where you can upskill yourself as an engineer or a work role that is related to engineering with the cutting edge research directly going into course modules.

And then another project that is also sponsoring us called Tririema, where it's about, yeah, upskilling the European workforce in digital and green skills.

So, yes.

Thank you so much for listening.