Human motion behavior evaluation: the possibility of improving human-robot collaboration

Collaborative robots are today frequently used in industrial tasks in which humans can participate directly or indirectly. This paper focuses on one of the main challenges this interaction brings, which is ensuring safe and effective collaboration between a human and a robot during a working task. The focus of this paper is assessment of human motion behavior, such as cognitive and manipulation effort, with aim of providing better human-robot collaboration. The skill evaluation is based on an experiment that consists of two manipulation and assembling tasks and incorporates UR-5 robot. Cognitive effort is measured with an EEG device, while manipulative effort is tracked with an EMG set on the participant’s biceps and triceps. The results shown in this paper could not only be used for analyzing the human motion behavior but could also find application in future human-robot collaboration (HRC) in industrial tasks.