Faraz Yousuf is a Sr. Principal Robotics Application Engineer at Eli Lilly, working at the intersection of human robot interaction, robotic safety, inspection robotics, and system integration in pharmaceutical manufacturing environments. He has experience in designing, deploying, integrating, and supporting ASRSs, AGV/AMRs, and inspection quadrupeds across multiple types of process areas. He also contributes to the safety standards committees in ANSI R15.08 Part 3, ISO 25785-1 and TR R15.108 that focuses on safety for dynamically stable robots.
Human-robot interaction (HRI) is one of the biggest unlocks left in industrial automation to enable stronger safety, but most HRI research happens on university campuses that produces data that rarely survives contact with a live production floor. Running studies inside a working manufacturing site is logistically hard enough that most academia–industry partnerships never get past the first meeting. Faraz Yousuf (Eli Lilly) and Dr. Anastasia Kouvaras Ostrowski (Purdue) share what they learned running HRI field studies with manufacturing and warehouse operators around live AGVs, some early findings of people's perception of robots on the manufacturing floor and the playbook they built to make the partnership repeatable.
