Strategies for workers’ skills development and engagement: the AGILEHAND project solutions’ developers point of view

AGILEHAND is a Horizon Europe project that aims at developing advanced technologies for grading, handling and packaging autonomously soft and deformable products, as a strategic instrument to improve flexibility, agility and reconfigurability of production and logistic systems of the European manufacturing companies. In this project Artificial Intelligence and Robotic solutions will be developed. As AI automation progresses, there's a risk of creating significant skill gaps where displaced workers may not have the necessary skills to transition to new roles, leading to long-term unemployment and economic disparities. In this context, some questionnaires have been developed in order to understand the workers’ skills and engagement strategies necessary for using the AGILEHAND solutions. These questionnaires have been filled out by AGILEHAND solutions’ developers in order to collect the designers point of view. In conclusion this study has an important role in describing the current AGILEHAND scenario, providing interesting information for both researchers and designers since it defines the main enabling factors for successful AGILEHAND implementation and the main problems that designers and practitioners could face. © 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors.