Towards an Evaluation Framework of Safety, Trust, and Operator Experience in Different Demonstrators of Human-Robot Collaboration

• Advancements in human-robot collaboration (HRC) are regarded as major aspects of the future Industry 4.0. HRC entails humans that cooperatively work with robots in dynamic, changing, and unpredictable settings where they should assist and learn from each other and automatically respond to changes. This requires research and development to investigate and evaluate how these hybrid collaborative systems should function and distribute work. The common practice is to focus on performance-related issues, which are highly influenced by human factors (HF). Because of the prevailing orientation towards HF, HRC runs the risk of not considering the modern understandings of human cognition and technology-mediated activity, in which humans are considered as actors (not factors) in a socio-material context. Although HF is dominant and well justified, the problem is that it may hinder general development, because it is not aligned with the modern understanding of cultivating a safety culture that promotes continuous improvements and development as an inherent attitude of companies and work practices. Taking an opposite approach, where the human operators working together with robots are playing active and positive roles in constructing safety, trust, and good operator experience. Hence, the collaborative human-robot system perspective addresses the need to develop and assess new evaluation methods that consider aspects like safety, trust, and operator experience from modern understandings of human cognition and technology-mediated activity, where also different levels of in human-robot collaboration have to be considered. This paper presents 1) the initial conceptual framework of HRC that addresses these above issues. It also describes 2) the design of a comparative analysis and benchmarking tasks of operators when interacting closely with robots, in three different demonstrators of varying levels of collaboration. The final outcome from this work should, in the long run, function as a roadmap for successful implementation of HRC in industry.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Robotteknik och automation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Robotics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Industry 4.0

Trust

Safety

Operator Experience

Human-Robot Collaboration

INF201 Virtual Production Development

INF201 Virtual Production Development

Interaction Lab (ILAB)

Interaction Lab (ILAB)

Production and Automation Engineering

Produktion och automatiseringsteknik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)