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The extensive introduction of robotics in manufacturing industry has been a fact in the last decades. Most of capacities that envisage higher production performance levels are in the field of artificial intelligence applied to manufacturing tasks. However, some social aspects of automation are still not yet solved. Some deals with ergonomic design, but most deals with responsibility, situation awareness, risk assessment and quality of working life. In safer cooperative working conditions are relevant topics under the research topics expertise of “social implications of robotics”.

Moniz, AB.  2010.  Anthropocentric-based robotic and autonomous systems: assessment for new organisational options, 5-6 Nov. 2009. Conference "Autonomous systems: inter-relations of technical and societal issues". , Monte de Caparica: IET Abstract

Research activities at European level on the concept of new working environments offers considerable attention to the challenges of the increased competencies of people working together with automated technologies. Since the decade of 1980 the development of approaches for the humanization of work organization, and for the development of participative organizational options induced to new proposals related to the development of complex and integrated automated systems. From such parallel conceptual development emerged the concept of “anthropocentric robotic systems” and quickly it covered also other fields of automation. More recently, the debate also covers issues related to working perception of people dealing with autonomous systems (e.g. Autonomous robotics) in tasks related to production planning, to programming and to process control. In fact, today one can understand the wider use of the anthropocentrism concept of production architectures, when understanding the new quality of these systems. In this chapter the author analyses the evolution of these issues related to governance of ICT applied to manufacturing and industrial services in research programmes strengthening very much the ‘classical’ concept of anthropocentric-based systems. It is emerging a new value of the intuitive capacities and human knowledge in the optimization and flexibilization of the manufacturing processes. While this would be a pre-condition to understand the human-robot communication needs, there is also a need to take into consideration the qualitative variables in the definition and design of robotic systems, jobs and production systems.