Autistic adults face lower employment rates than their equally qualified peers, in part because many workplaces don’t meet their needs. Meanwhile, manufacturers are struggling to hire skilled workers, and they may be overlooking the autistic talent pool.
A team of researchers at Virginia Tech wants to solve both problems: increasing autistic employment rates and bolstering the manufacturing workforce by designing collaborative robots, or “cobots”, that can work alongside neurodivergent workers and provide real-time feedback and personalized support.
Funding the research is a National Science Foundation grant of over $1.5 million to collaborators at Virginia Tech, George Washington University, and the University of Notre Dame. Virginia Tech is leading the project, with its share of the grant totaling $800,000. [Read more…] about Virginia Tech researchers develop AI-powered cobots to support autistic workers in manufacturing