Reduction of Heart Rate by Robot Trajectory Profiles in Cooperative HRI

In the context of workplace health promotion, this paper investigates the impact of various industrial robot trajectory profiles on physiological responses as well as subjective performance in a user study with a cooperative human-robot interaction task. It is found, that minimum-jerk trajectories are superior to conventional or even avoidance behavior trajectories in terms of a significantly reduced heart rate. The effect is independent of the initial arousal state of the test subjects and no interactions with gender or previous experience are found. Interestingly, subjective performance is rated inversely by the human users. The findings suggest integration of minimum-jerk optimization, whenever the interaction scenario allows, in order to reduce emotional stress with minimum effort in trajectory design.