Robots are becoming more and more present in our everyday life: they are already used for domestic tasks, for companionship activities, and soon they will be used to assist humans and collaborate with them in their work. Human-robot collaboration has already been studied in the industry, for ergonomics and efficiency purposes, but more from a safety than from an acceptability point of view. In this work, we focused on how people perceive robots in a collaboration task and we proposed to use virtual reality as a simulation environment to test different parameters, by making users collaborate with virtual robots. A simple use case was implemented to compare different robot appearances and different robot movements. Questionnaires and physiological measures were used to assess the acceptability level of each condition with a user study. The results showed that the perception of robot movements depended on robot appearance and that a more anthropomorphic robot, both in its appearance and movements, was not necessarily better accepted by the users in a collaboration task. Finally, this preliminary use case was also the opportunity to guarantee the relevance of using such a methodology -based on virtual reality, questionnaires and physiological measures -for future studies.

This paper focuses on the acceptability of humanrobot collaboration in industrial environments. A use case was designed in which an operator and a robot had to work sideby-side on automotive assembly lines, with different levels of co-presence. This use case was implemented both in a physical and in a virtual situation using virtual reality. A user study was conducted with operators from the automotive industry. The operators were asked to assess the acceptability to work side-by-side with the robot through questionnaires, and physiological measures (heart rate and skin conductance) were taken during the user study. The results showed that working close to the robot imposed more constraints on the operators and required them to adapt to the robot. Moreover, an increase in skin conductance level was observed after working close to the robot. Although no significant difference was found in the questionnaires results between the physical and virtual situations, the increase in physiological measures was significant only in the physical situation. This suggests that virtual reality may be a good tool to assess the acceptability of human-robot collaboration and draw preliminary results through questionnaires, but that physical experiments are still necessary to a complete study, especially when dealing with physiological measures.

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International audienceThis paper deals with the design and the evaluation of human-like robot movements. Three criteria were proposed and evaluated regarding their impact on the human-likeness of the robot movements: The inertia of the base, the inertia of the end-effector and the velocity profile. A specific tool was designed to generate different levels of anthropomorphism according to these three parameters. An industrial use case was designed to compare several robot movements. This use case was implemented with a virtual robot arm in a virtual environment, using virtual reality. A user study was conducted to determine what were the important criteria in the perception of human-like robot movements and what were their correlations with other notions such as safety and preference. The results showed that inertia on the end-effector was of most importance for a movement to be perceived as human-like and nonaggressive, and that those characteristics helped the users feel safer, less stressed and more willing to work with the robot

Cobotic workstations in industrial plants involve a new kind of collaborative robots that can interact with operators. These cobots enable more flexibility and they can reduce the cycle time and the floor space of the workstation. However, cobots also introduce new safety concerns with regard to operators, and they may have an impact on the workstation ergonomics. For those reasons, introducing cobots in a workstation always require additional studies on safety and ergonomics before being applied and certified. Certification rules are often complex to understand. We present the SEEROB framework for the Safety and Ergonomics Evaluation of ROBotic workstations. The SEEROB framework simulates a physics-based digital twin of the cobotic workstation and computes a large panel of criteria used for safety and ergonomics. These criteria may be processed for the certification of the workstation. The SEEROB framework also uses extended reality technologies to display the digital twin and its associated data: users can use virtual reality headsets for the design of non-existing workstations, and mixed reality devices to better understand safety and ergonomics constraints on existing workstations. The SEEROB framework was tested on various laboratory and industrial use cases, involving different kinds of robots.

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Animated virtual humans may rely on full-body tracking system to reproduce user motions. In this paper, we reduce tracking to the upper-body and reconstruct the lower body to follow autonomously its upper counterpart. Doing so reduces the number of sensors required, making the application of virtual humans simpler and cheaper. It also enable deployment in cluttered scenes where the lower body is often hidden. The contribution here is the inversion of the well-known capture problem for bipedal walking. It determines footsteps rather than center-of-mass motions and yet can be solved with an off-the-shelf capture problem solver. The quality of our method is assessed in real-time tracking experiments on a wide variety of movements.

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