Design of a Gamified Training System for Human-Robot Cooperation

Human-Robot Cooperation (HRC) is a field which focuses on employing the best skills of both the robot and the human working together to achieve a common or shared task more efficiently. In most cases, both the human and the robot should know the status of each other and interchange data accordingly. There are several successfully researched HRC systems in the literature proposing solutions to various industrial problems yet few of them are used actively in real-world tasks. One of the major reasons for this gap is that the developed HRC systems do not offer an effective training procedure. The availability of a versatile training setup to get the optimal efficiency is important in addition to evaluating the developed HRC system's usability. Recent studies show that serious games offer effective training outcomes in various sectors such as the military, disaster drills, aviation, health etc. This paper presents an open-source gamified modular training design for HRC applications. It shows how the HRC system can be trained using serious games, what game elements can be utilized and how the learning curve of the user can be measured to evaluate the usability and efficiency. The proposed design is demonstrated through a real-world Cooperative Lifting (co-lift) scenario. The main motivation is to constitute a baseline for effective training of the HRC systems so that the gap between research and successful innovation in the HRC field becomes more narrow.