Using Virtual Reality to Test Human-Robot Interaction During a Collaborative Task

Abstract

The use of collaborative robots in the manufacturing industry has widely spread in the last decade. In order to be efficient, the human-robot collaboration needs to be properly designed by also taking into account the operator’s psychophysiological reactions. Virtual Reality can be used as a tool to simulate human-robot collaboration in a safe and cheap way. Here, we present a virtual collaborative platform in which the human operator and a simulated robot coordinate their actions to accomplish a simple assembly task. In this study, the robot moved slowly or more quickly in order to assess the effect of its velocity on the human’s responses. Ten participants tested this application by using an Oculus Rift head-mounted display; ARTracking cameras and a Kinect system were used to track the operator’s right arm movements and hand gestures respectively. Performance, user experience, and physiological responses were recorded. The results showed that while humans’ performances and evaluations varied as a function of the robot’s velocity, no differences were found in the physiological responses. Taken together, these data highlight the relevance of the kinematic aspects of robot’s motion within a human-robot collaboration and provide valuable insights to further develop our virtual human-machine interactive platform.

Human Factors Considerations and Metrics in Shared Space Human-Robot Collaboration: A Systematic Review

“…Another included study did not find a difference in ECG response between the stress and no stress condition (Eimontaite et al, 2019). Variation in skin conductance level was also evaluated but no significant findings are reported (Etzi et al, 2019). Skin potential reflex features included the amplitude and frequency of response-where higher amplitude and frequency correlated with higher stress (Fujita et al, 2010), (Kato et al, 2010), (Arai et al, 2010), (Tan et al, 2010).…”

“…Operator manipulation speed has been shown to decrease as anxiety and mental strain increase (Tan et al, 2010), owing to increased cobot movement speeds (Charalambous et al, 2016), (Etzi et al, 2019), (Koppenborg et al, 2017), (Henriksen et al, 2020). The impact of cobot speed was also found to influence the perception of team-fluency, with improved team-fluency when speeds are slower (Koppenborg et al, 2017).…”

Citation review of Human-Machine Collaboration in Virtual Reality for Adaptive Production Engineering by de Giorgio et al.

“…Among those, one is the journal article "Strategic systematic for software development in industry 4.0" (Oliveira Valério et al 2020). Four are conference papers (Arntz and Eimler 2020; H. P. Etzi et al 2019;Metzner, Utsch, et al 2020), specifically "Experiencing AI in VR: A Qualitative Study on Designing a Human-Machine Collaboration Scenario" (Arntz and Eimler 2020), "Use of Virtual Reality in Product Development by Distributed Teams" (H. P. Balzerkiewitz and Stechert 2020), "A system for human-in-the-loop simulation of industrial collaborative robot applications" (Metzner, Utsch, et al 2020) and "Using virtual reality to test human-robot interaction during a collaborative task" (Etzi et al 2019). Four are theses (Gong 2019;Gustavsson 2020; Lloyd Reyson Robles 2020; Tolman 2018).…”

“…SS is missing 9 citations from RG and GS. In particular, the Portuguese journal article "Simulação como Tecnologia Habilitadora da Indústria 4.0: Uma Revisão da Literatura" (Randon and Cecconello 2019); three conference papers (Arntz and Eimler 2020; H. P. Etzi et al 2019) that are "Using virtual reality to test human-robot interaction during a collaborative task" (Etzi et al 2019), "Experiencing AI in VR: A Qualitative Study on Designing a Human-Machine Collaboration Scenario" (Arntz and…”

“…In the related work section, in the subsection related to the use of virtual reality in human-robot collaboration, Etzi et al (2019) mention the work of de Giorgio et al 2017as a human-robot platform in which the user "wears a head-mounted display (HDM; HTC Vive™) and moves a robotic arm (ABB IRB 120) through a controller to perform an assembly task".…”