Workers’ Physiological/Psychological Responses during Human-Robot Collaboration in an Immersive Virtual Reality Environment

Abstract

The construction industry is facing problems with low productivity rates, safety concerns, and labor shortages, leading to the adoption of robotic technologies. While robots can replace tasks requiring repeatability, power, speed, and precision, tasks requiring intelligence, flexibility, and problem-solving still need skilled human workers. For effective human-robot collaboration on highly dynamic and uncertain construction job sites, robots must be designed and controlled to earn workers’ trust. To identify trust mechanisms facilitating collaboration, this study aims to analyze human physiological/psychological responses to construction robots. Using wearable sensors, this study measured responses during virtual reality experiments in which humans worked collaboratively with robots. The results showed that robot movement speed, proximity distance, and worker engagement significantly affected human responses, but the robot’s direction of approach did not. These findings can improve collaborative task design and guidelines for improving safety and productivity in human-robot collaboration from a human-centered perspective.