Reducing anxiety while interacting with industrial robots

Abstract

Studies in the field of human-robot collaboration have shown that the direct cooperation of humans and robots can lead to increased anxiety feelings of workers. Previous studies realize either a collaboration with lightweight robots or a temporal and spatial separation of humans and robots. We use a robot with a load capacity greater than 200 kg with a temporal and spatial overlap of the working areas. Three different prototypes for Google Glass render the current state of the system in the form of text, icons or a traffic light. The evaluation in a comparative field study shows that when using any of the three prototypes, the perceived state anxiety is low.