The NASA-TLX Approach to Understand Workers Workload in Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is becoming increasingly widespread in today's production systems, as it can contribute to achieving more efficient and flexible production systems.Given the growing importance of HRC, this paper addresses the significance of human workload in HRC.To study workers workload an experiment was conducted using NASA-TLX questionnaire.The experiment featured two scenarios involving the same operation but varying robot motion parameters.Recognizing that individual differences contribute to success of collaboration, the experiment considered worker utilization in relation to robot motion parameters.To ensure the credibility of the experimental results, the robot motion parameters were adjusted to each individual in order to achieve the same conditions and utilization at all participants.Results revealed that worker utilization, in conjunction with robot motion parameters significantly influenced worker workload.The results highlight the need for personalized guidelines in collaborative workplaces that emphasize individual differences in abilities, skills and personalities to increase overall well-being and robot and worker productivity.