Designing Human-Robot Collaboration for the Preparation of Personalized Medicines

Advancements in robotics and automation technologies have the potential to enable breakthrough innovations in a variety of industries, and the pharmaceutical sector is no exception. The preparation of galenic formulations, involving the compounding and dispensing of medications, when personalized medicines are needed, e.g., to overcome allergy problems, is a critical process in the field of small scale pharmaceutical manufacturing. Traditionally, this process has relied solely on human expertise of pharmacists and their manual labor, which can be time-consuming, prone to errors, and subject to variations in quality. To overcome these limitations, the use of collaborative robots is envisaged in our project. A collaborative robot can in fact work with the pharmacist synergistically, by improving accuracy and increasing productivity. However, the main challenge is providing the pharmacists with an interactive system that supports them in robot programming. In this paper, we analyze the problem from the users' point of view and propose preliminary low-fidelity prototypes of an interactive system suitable to pharmacists' needs and skills.