EBuddy: a workflow orchestrator for industrial human-machine collaboration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Banfi, Michele, Felici, Rocco, Baraldo, Stefano, Avram, Oliver, Valente, Anna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Banfi, Michele
Felici, Rocco
Baraldo, Stefano
Avram, Oliver
Valente, Anna
author_facet Banfi, Michele
Felici, Rocco
Baraldo, Stefano
Avram, Oliver
Valente, Anna
contents This paper presents EBuddy, a voice-guided workflow orchestrator for natural human-machine collaboration in industrial environments. EBuddy targets a recurrent bottleneck in tool-intensive workflows: expert know-how is effective but difficult to scale, and execution quality degrades when procedures are reconstructed ad hoc across operators and sessions. EBuddy operationalizes expert practice as a finite state machine (FSM) driven application that provides an interpretable decision frame at runtime (current state and admissible actions), so that spoken requests are interpreted within state-grounded constraints, while the system executes and monitors the corresponding tool interactions. Through modular workflow artifacts, EBuddy coordinates heterogeneous resources, including GUI-driven software and a collaborative robot, leveraging fully voice-based interaction through automatic speech recognition and intent understanding. An industrial pilot on impeller blade inspection and repair preparation for directed energy deposition (DED), realized by human-robot collaboration, shows substantial reductions in end-to-end process duration across onboarding, 3D scanning and processing, and repair program generation, while preserving repeatability and low operator burden.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_28579
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EBuddy: a workflow orchestrator for industrial human-machine collaboration
Banfi, Michele
Felici, Rocco
Baraldo, Stefano
Avram, Oliver
Valente, Anna
Robotics
This paper presents EBuddy, a voice-guided workflow orchestrator for natural human-machine collaboration in industrial environments. EBuddy targets a recurrent bottleneck in tool-intensive workflows: expert know-how is effective but difficult to scale, and execution quality degrades when procedures are reconstructed ad hoc across operators and sessions. EBuddy operationalizes expert practice as a finite state machine (FSM) driven application that provides an interpretable decision frame at runtime (current state and admissible actions), so that spoken requests are interpreted within state-grounded constraints, while the system executes and monitors the corresponding tool interactions. Through modular workflow artifacts, EBuddy coordinates heterogeneous resources, including GUI-driven software and a collaborative robot, leveraging fully voice-based interaction through automatic speech recognition and intent understanding. An industrial pilot on impeller blade inspection and repair preparation for directed energy deposition (DED), realized by human-robot collaboration, shows substantial reductions in end-to-end process duration across onboarding, 3D scanning and processing, and repair program generation, while preserving repeatability and low operator burden.
title EBuddy: a workflow orchestrator for industrial human-machine collaboration
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28579