User Experience Goals for Designing Industrial Human-Cobot Collaboration

Chowdhury, Aparajita; Ahtinen, Aino; Pieters, Roel; Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Kaisa

doi:10.1145/3419249.3420161

Cited by 14 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…This is achieved by taking advantage of the intelligence and connectivity capability of the cobot, which allows to quickly change the cobot task and adapt to the flexibility required by SMEs (Guerin et al, 2015) . In addition, these features are also appreciated by operators without HRC expertise/confidence (Chowdhury et al, 2020) .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human factors in cobot era: a review of modern production systems features

et al. 2022

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Collaborative robots are increasingly common in modern production systems, since they allow to merge the productivity of automated systems with the flexibility and dexterity of manual ones. The direct interaction between the human and the robot can be the greatest advantage and the greatest limit of collaborative systems at the same time, depending on how it affects human factors like ergonomics and mental stress. This work presents an overview of collaborative robotics considering three main dimensions: robot features, modern production systems characteristics and human factors. A literature review on how such dimensions interact is addressed and a discussion on the current state of the art is presented, showing the topics that have been already widely explored and the research gaps that should be fulfilled in the future.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human factors in cobot era: a review of modern production systems features

et al. 2022

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“…In studies that addressed the effect of collaborating with a robotic arm on the user, these concepts have often been assessed through self-reporting and performance metrics. For instance, to investigate user experience with a robotic arm, Chowdhury et al (2020) (Brooke 1996) was also employed to collect self-reported measures. Hsieh and Lu (2018) measured the task completion time of operators collaborating with either a physical interface or one of three different virtual interfaces.…”

Section: Metrics For the Assessment Of Human Factors In Hrcsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The virtualization of human–robot interactions: a user-centric workload assessment

et al. 2022

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Interest in the virtualization of human–robot interactions is increasing, yet the impact that collaborating with either virtual or physical robots has on the human operator’s mental state is still insufficiently studied. In the present work, we aimed to fill this gap by conducting a systematic assessment of a human–robot collaborative framework from a user-centric perspective. Mental workload was measured in participants working in synergistic co-operation with a physical and a virtual collaborative robot (cobot) under different levels of task demands. Performance and implicit and explicit workload were assessed as a function of pupil size variation and self-reporting questionnaires. In the face of a similar self-reported mental demand when maneuvering the virtual or physical cobot, operators showed shorter operation times and lower implicit workload when interacting with the virtual cobot compared to its physical counterpart. Furthermore, the benefits of collaborating with a virtual cobot most vividly manifested when the user had to position the robotic arm with higher precision. These results shed light on the feasibility and importance of relying on multidimensional assessments in real-life work settings, including implicit workload predictors such as pupillometric measures. From a broader perspective, our findings suggest that virtual simulations have the potential to bring significant advantages for both the user's mental well-being and industrial production, particularly for highly complex and demanding tasks.

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“…Additional trends in collaboration between human and robot take the fluency of interaction ( Hoffman, 2019 ) or human factors ( Chen and Barnes, 2014 ) into account. This implies that the user experience ( Chowdhury et al, 2020 ) and user acceptance ( Müller-Abdelrazeq et al, 2019 ) is considered by design of the interaction, with suitable technology that improves, instead of hinders, the outcome.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coordinating Shared Tasks in Human-Robot Collaboration by Commands

et al. 2021

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Human-robot collaboration is gaining more and more interest in industrial settings, as collaborative robots are considered safe and robot actions can be programmed easily by, for example, physical interaction. Despite this, robot programming mostly focuses on automated robot motions and interactive tasks or coordination between human and robot still requires additional developments. For example, the selection of which tasks or actions a robot should do next might not be known beforehand or might change at the last moment. Within a human-robot collaborative setting, the coordination of complex shared tasks, is therefore more suited to a human, where a robot would act upon requested commands.In this work we explore the utilization of commands to coordinate a shared task between a human and a robot, in a shared work space. Based on a known set of higher-level actions (e.g., pick-and-placement, hand-over, kitting) and the commands that trigger them, both a speech-based and graphical command-based interface are developed to investigate its use. While speech-based interaction might be more intuitive for coordination, in industrial settings background sounds and noise might hinder its capabilities. The graphical command-based interface circumvents this, while still demonstrating the capabilities of coordination. The developed architecture follows a knowledge-based approach, where the actions available to the robot are checked at runtime whether they suit the task and the current state of the world. Experimental results on industrially relevant assembly, kitting and hand-over tasks in a laboratory setting demonstrate that graphical command-based and speech-based coordination with high-level commands is effective for collaboration between a human and a robot.

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User Experience Goals for Designing Industrial Human-Cobot Collaboration

Cited by 14 publications

References 33 publications

Human factors in cobot era: a review of modern production systems features

Human factors in cobot era: a review of modern production systems features

The virtualization of human–robot interactions: a user-centric workload assessment

Coordinating Shared Tasks in Human-Robot Collaboration by Commands

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