Towards Autonomous Collaborative Robot Assistance in Stationary Tooling Tasks: Lessons Learned from Empirical Evaluations in VR

Synergizing unique strengths of humans and autonomous collaborative robots (cobots) potentially enables a level of manufacturing flexibility that was never achieved by traditional automation. Moreover, in this era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), intelligent cobots can assist human workers in stationary tooling tasks to complement limitations that may incur due to physical and mental workloads. Although ergonomic Human Robot Collaborations (HRC) could promote healthy working postures in human workers, impact on the operator's mental state while collaborating with cobots is still insufficiently studied. For instance, human workers can have mixed perceptions on their robotic counterparts and the autonomous decisions made by these cobots while reconfiguring unwieldy workpieces could affect user satisfaction, perceived usability and the overall technology acceptance in HRC applications. To address these aspects in collaborative working scenarios, adaptive robot behaviors in assisting cobots are further investigated over empirical studies before deploying them into production. With virtual reality (VR) - based user interactions being effective for conducting Human-In-The-Loop simulations of critical working scenarios in cobot assisted stationary tooling tasks, an extensive user study was conducted with the help of an interactive demonstrator and this article presents the lessons learned from empirical evaluations in VR.