AR-supported Human-Robot Collaboration: Facilitating Workspace Awareness and Parallelized Assembly Tasks

Abstract

While technologies for human-robot collaboration are rapidly advancing, plenty of aspects still need further investigation, such as ensuring workspace awareness, enabling the operator to reschedule tasks on the fly, and how users prefer to coordinate and collaborate with robots. To address these, we propose an Augmented Reality interface that supports human-robot collaboration in an assembly task by (1) enabling the inspection of planned and ongoing robot processes through dynamic task lists and a path visualization, (2) allowing the operator to also delegate tasks to the robot, and (3) presenting step-by-step assembly instructions. We evaluate our AR interface in comparison to a state-of-the-art tablet interface in a user study, where participants collaborated with a robot arm in a shared workspace to complete an assembly task. Our findings confirm the feasibility and potential of AR-assisted human-robot collaboration, while pointing to some central challenges that require further work.