The pervasive availability and reliability of ICT infrastructures enabled many people to work from home and cooperate anywhere carrying many advantages for the worker, but also for the employer, and for the Society at large. Unfortunately, at present smart working is limited to immaterial tasks. Most tasks involving interaction with the physical environment still require human operators to be physically there, strongly limiting the possibility to exploit the skills of high specialized and qualified workers.
Different emergencies, such as in case of care assistance of elderly/disabled or in inspection and maintenance scenarios, require the converging of a specialized technician in a precise geographical location at a given time.
This step can take up to several hours while, with physical smart working, competences can be made available remotely, i.e., the same technician could remotely connect to an avatar robot residing in place, use his/her own skills in combination with the enriched artificial perception, embodied intelligence and manipulation capabilities afforded by the robot to promptly intervene. The same applies for activities conducted in environments that are not easily reachable, or even pose hazards to human operators. Other than a direct intervention during an emergency, the same technology can be used by qualified specialists to train inexperienced workers.
The development of such robot avatars is nowadays made possible thanks to the appearance of new enabling technologies, such as soft robotics with embodied intelligence and explainable Artificial Intelligence. Relying on EAI humans can understand and interact with, “intelligent” soft robotic systems reproducing human ability to smoothly operate in the environment, thanks to advanced haptic sensors and interfaces to measure and display physical contact information. In addition, modern networks allow the communication of time critical information, and shared autonomy control techniques can relieve the human workload while not alienating human precious skills to a machine.
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