Advancing human-robot collaboration: XPRES welcomes postdoc Tianyu Wang
Brain-Inspired Adaptive and Agentic Human-Robot Collaboration is a fast-developing field at the intersection of Industrial AI, cognitive robotics, and digital twins, driven by Industry 5.0 initiatives across Sweden and Europe. XPRES is now strengthening its research efforts in this field.
Foundation models, agentic AI, and adaptive control have provided significant progress for manufacturing environments with constantly shifting tasks, workers, and sustainability goals. Yet there are still no unified frameworks for deploying these capabilities at scale in real industrial settings.
To help close this gap, the new XPRES postdoc Tianyu Wang will conduct research on brain-inspired multi-timescale adaptation and agentic orchestration for human-robot collaboration, enabling systems to learn, adjust, and coordinate without costly reprogramming each time conditions change.
“The goal is systems that can keep up with workforce variability and rapid product changes. Some examples are adaptive robotic assembly cells that reconfigure themselves based on operator behaviour and demand, and AI-enabled inspection and production planning systems that dynamically cut energy use, scrap, and downtime in battery or automotive manufacturing,” says Tianyu.
His research will also tackle challenges like safe human–robot interaction, integration of AI with legacy production systems, and translating data-driven intelligence into reliable, interpretable decisions under changing industrial conditions.
The research is carried out in collaboration with KTH, industrial partners, and the Swedish Production Cluster, supervised by Xi Wang at KTH and co-supervised by Sten Grahn at RISE.