Do Speed and Proximity Affect Human-Robot Collaboration with an Industrial Robot Arm?

Abstract

Current guidelines for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) allow a person to be within the working area of an industrial robot arm whilst maintaining their physical safety. However, research into increasing automation and social robotics have shown that attributes in the robot, such as speed and proximity setting, can influence a person’s workload and trust. Despite this, studies into how an industrial robot arm’s attributes affect a person during HRC are limited and require further development. Therefore, a study was proposed to assess the impact of robot’s speed and proximity setting on a person’s workload and trust during an HRC task. Eighty-three participants from Cranfield University and the ASK Centre, BAE Systems Samlesbury, completed a task in collaboration with a UR5 industrial robot arm running at different speeds and proximity settings, workload and trust were measured after each run. Workload was found to be positively related to speed but not significantly related to proximity setting. Significant interaction was not found for trust with speed or proximity setting. This study showed that even when operating within current safety guidelines, an industrial robot can affect a person’s workload. The lack of significant interaction with trust was attributed to the robot’s relatively small size and high success rate, and therefore may have an influence in larger industrial robots. As workload and trust can have a significant impact on a person’s performance and satisfaction, it is key to understand this relationship early in the development and design of collaborative work cells to ensure safe and high productivity.

The Effect of Robot Skill Level and Communication in Rapid, Proximate Human-Robot Collaboration

“…In this way, manufacturing is able to take advantage of a human's ability to deal with uncertainty and variability while utilizing automation to its fullest [26]. However, prior work has noted that stress, anxiety, and fear levels of a human user around a fast-moving robot with the capability of causing physical harm are high [3,6,11,50,60,62,65], presenting interesting challenges in producing high-performance HRC. Furthermore, as producing high-speed robotic maneuvers is a difficult challenge in itself, poor performance of the robot can adversely affect user trust [20,35,58,73].…”

“…Fast moving collaborative robots in proximity to humans could potentially induce fear, anxiety, and stress because the robot's intention may be unclear, the behaviors exhibited by the robot could be unpredictable, and the risk of the human coming to harm is objectively higher [3,6,50,60]. Additionally, humans have less time to react, exacerbating the concerns of safety and trust [3,11,62,65].…”

Qhali: A Humanoid Robot for Assisting in Mental Health Treatment

“…Recent studies highlight the important role of movement speed in influencing the perception of dynamic gestures [ 55 ]. Current research underscores a human preference for slower robotic movements, associating this attribute with increased comfort and a sense of safety [ 55 , 56 , 57 ]. In light of these findings, our goal is to preserve the existing motion speed of Qhali, aligning with this identified preference to ensure user comfort and optimize gesture recognition.…”

The Expanding Role of Artificial Intelligence in Collaborative Robots for Industrial Applications: A Systematic Review of Recent Works

“…From Table 2, there were several works that implemented cobots but were not able to carry out collaborative tasks due to safety concerns. For non-collaborative tasks, AI was employed in [47,49,50], whereas [48] utilized control algorithms and [51] used a linear mixed effects model. Bagheri et al [47] proposed a bidirectional and more transparent interaction-based learning between human beings and cobots to improve interaction with enhanced performance using a transparent graphical user interface (T-GUI).…”