Effects on User Experience During Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Scenarios

Abstract

In smart manufacturing environments robots collaborate with human operators as peers. They even share the same working space and time. An intuitive interaction with different input modalities is decisive to reduce workload and training periods for collaboration. We introduce our interaction system that is able to recognize gestures, actions and objects in a typical smart working scenario. As key aspect, this article considers an empirical investigation of input modalities (touch, gesture), individual differences (performance, recognition rate, previous knowledge) and boundary conditions (level of automation) on user experience. Therefore, answers from 31 participants within two experiments are collected. We show that the arrangement of the human-robot collaboration (input modalities, boundary conditions) has a significant effect on user experience in real-world environments. This effect and the individual differences between participants can be measured utilizing recognition rates and standardized usability questionnaires.