Attitudes of Factory Workers towards Industrial and Collaborative Robots

Abstract

Despite the predicted growth of the amount of collaborative robots, little attention has been paid to the attitudes and needs of potential future users of these robots (e.g. factory workers). The main goal of our study was to identify recommendations to improve collaboration between robots and factory workers. We used the collaborative robot Baxter as a probe to elicit repsonses from factory workers in order to explore their perceptions regarding working with robots. We conducted four interviews with two factory workers simultaneously participating in each interview (n = 8). These interviews were analyzed and our findings suggest that workers believe robots can and have taken people's jobs. However, they also believe that robots can decrease their workload.