Patricio Vela
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Factories that make many different products in small batches are hard to fully automate, because robots are costly to program for each new task and still perform imperfectly. Collaborative robots that work alongside people offer a middle path that boosts productivity without replacing workers.
- Fields
Engineering
Social Science
Computer Science
- Topics
collaborative robots
cobots
human-robot collaboration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Develop an instrument for measuring worker, robot and supervisor technology adoption and performance through a grounded theory study of collaborative robotics in industry.
- Test whether workers tolerate robot imperfection when they can allocate tasks between themselves and a collaborative robot to finish faster, using experiments in a simulated manufacturing work cell.
- Test whether a supervisor who guides task allocation further improves worker-robot team performance, and use the results to build the Worker-Robot Supervisor Effectiveness Model.
- Validate and refine the model by integrating a collaborative robot into the existing processes of a real-world manufacturing company.
More about the research
Most research looks only at the worker and the robot. This collaborative project adds a third role, the line supervisor, who manages workloads and assigns tasks. The goal is a framework for judging whether a company is ready for collaborative robots, how well they are adopted and how well the team performs.
Why it matters
Small and medium US manufacturers struggle to automate varied, low-volume work. A validated model for how workers, collaborative robots and supervisors should share tasks could help these companies adopt robots more effectively, raise productivity and improve workers' quality of life without displacing jobs. Field testing with Southeastern companies aims to ensure the guidance holds up on real factory floors.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
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