Industrial robots, Workers’ safety, and health

The Relationships of Human-Cobot Interaction Fluency with Job Performance and Job Satisfaction among Cobot Operators—The Moderating Role of Workload

“…As predicted, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of HRI fluency positively relate to operators’ knowledge, evaluative judgments, and good opinions about the job [ 53 ]. Although cobots have been generally promoted as an example of enabling technology [ 7 ] that helps prevent adverse health effects of work [ 16 ] and promotes workers’ well-being [ 1 , 22 ], this might be the first study to empirically investigate such a relationship. As such, it gives evidence of the significance of coordinated cooperation between collaborative robots and their human counterparts for the job-related satisfaction of the latter.…”

“…Direct human-robot interaction aims at incorporating the unique advantages of humans [ 11 ] and collaborative robots [ 12 ] by combining the skills and abilities of both parties to achieve a common goal [ 13 ] in a temporospatial overlap [ 14 ]. Cobots take on strenuous and repetitive tasks [ 15 , 16 ] by providing stamina and strength [ 17 ] while human operators are responsible for handling unexpected events [ 11 ] due to their resources of flexibility and cognitive and soft skills [ 7 ]. Hence, human-cobot interaction results in a synergic combination of the capabilities of humans and their robotic counterparts [ 18 ].…”

“…Due to the increased job attractiveness through the means of human-robot interaction, organizations deploying collaborative robots can offset the shortage in the industry workforce and guarantee jobs at a certain site without the necessity to move the production elsewhere [ 19 ]. For operators, automated robotic systems can help prevent adverse health effects [ 16 ] during work in unsafe environments [ 20 ]. Generally, the surge of interest in collaborative robots stems from the fact that they are seen as technological solutions for improving performance [ 1 , 7 , 21 ].…”

“…The second aim of this study is the exploration of quantitative workload as a moderator in the relationships of HRI fluency with job performance and job satisfaction. The impetus for such exploration is the general notion that the direction and magnitude of the effects of robot deployment on operators are theoretically ambiguous and need further empirical verification [ 16 ]. Specifically, although the research on the positive impact of cobots on workers’ experiences has been prolific, the assumption that collaborative technology is exclusively advantageous would be biased.…”

Work strains and disabilities in French workers: A career‐long retrospective study

“…Unlike the aforementioned literature, there is also some emerging papers devoting to the beneficial influence of robots and artificial intelligence on health among workers (Dengler et al, 2022; Gihleb et al, 2022). For instance, Gihleb et al (2022) demonstrate that one standard deviation increase in robot exposure is associated with a 5% reduction in the probability of self‐reporting any disability in Germany.…”