Cognitive Benefits of Human-Robot Collaboration in Complex Industrial Operations: A Virtual Reality Experiment

Abstract

As a hallmark of Industry 4.0, collaborative robots (cobots) have been applied in various established industries such as manufacturing. In the construction industry, there is a growing interest and expectation regarding the use of cobots to improve productivity and safety. Although evidence from other industrial applications supports the benefits of cobots in performance improvement, the underlying mechanism remains unclear, let alone the evaluation and validation in construction operations. In this study, we hypothesize that the presence of cobots releases construction workers from less productive motor actions and enables workers to focus on work planning activities, which is more closely related to productivity. To test the hypothesis, we implemented a prototype of human-robot collaboration for a valve manipulation task that is commonly seen in industrial facility turnaround shutdown. A virtual reality (VR) model was created as the experiment platform, where participants (n=20) were asked to operate 24 valves in a given sequence according to the provided instructional information. The efficiency and task performance of test subjects were examined to quantify the benefits of robotic assistance, which was measured with an eye tracker. The results indicate that with the physical assistance of cobots, task performance was improved, and the user cognitive patterns were more preferred as they could allocate more neural resources and attention time on activity planning instead of repetitive motor actions. The findings are expected to set a foundation for better visibility, enhanced responsiveness, and better collaboration in the labor-intensive industry.