Interaction of Robot Speed and Distance in Human-Robot Collaboration: Impact on Human Trust, Safety, and Comfort

Robots are gradually being freed from their safety fences due to the advances in safety features integrated with most new robots. These robots enable a new form of human-robot interaction in which contact is possible. There are two robot-related factors that play a decisive role in the interaction dynamics and human perception in such a case – the motion speed and distance the robot keeps away from the human. Literature indicates that these factors influence whether humans perceive trust, safety, and comfort, which are essential components in the acceptance of robots by their end users. However, although speed and distance were intensively investigated in isolation, little is known about their combined effect. To this end, we conducted an experiment investigating the impact of the industrial robot arm’s approaching speed and stopping distance on the users’ trust, safety, and comfort while they were performing a collaborative task. Our results provide interesting insights into the implications of speed and trust. While we were able to replicate former studies in terms of implications of speed and distance, our data does not show any interaction effect between the two variables. However, our participants’ observations indicated that distance impacts the dependent variables more severely than speed.