Exploring Continuous Awareness Modelling for Improving Worker Safety and Trust*

The Industry 5.0 Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) goals have the potential for significantly reducing production costs, but require factory workers to trust that robots will not cause them physical harm when sharing the workspace in order to be achieved. To this end, we propose a model that adjusts the robot’s actions to an estimate of the workers’ awareness of its behavior. Its premise is that mutual awareness should be continuous, and if no recent visual contact has been established, then the robot should adapt its range of motion and speed in order to minimize the intersection between the robot’s space and the worker’s space. On the other hand, if the worker steadily establishes visual contact from times to times, the robot operates under a normal or a faster configuration. After a period of habituation, this awareness model can be further tweaked to continuously improve production times, while improving worker’s safety and trust. We present preliminary results of a pilot study with 32 participants, to asses if the existence of this awareness model impacts the outcomes of the combined task. The obtained tepidly optimistic results are the key to build upon in future designs.