Abstract
Collaborative robots are a new type of lightweight robots that are especially suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises. They offer new interaction opportunities and thereby pose new challenges with regard to technology acceptance. Despite acknowledging the importance of acceptance issues, small and medium-sized enterprises often lack coherent strategies to identify barriers and foster acceptance. Therefore, in this article, we present a collection of crucial acceptance factors with regard to collaborative robot use at the industrial workplace. Based on these factors, we present a web-based tool to estimate employee acceptance, to provide company representatives with practical recommendations and to stimulate reflection on acceptance issues. An evaluation with three German small and medium-sized enterprises reveals that the tool’s concept meets the demands of small and medium-sized enterprises and is perceived as beneficial as it raises awareness and deepens knowledge on this topic. In order to realise economic potentials, further low-threshold usable tools are needed to transfer research findings into the daily practice of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Highlights
Employing industrial robots has been a popular means to realise a highly automated and cost-efficient production in enterprises during the last decades, leading to an increasing amount of industrial robots in factories [1]
All company representatives agreed that acceptance is a crucial factor for successful technology adoption, they all denied having structured instruments or wellproven strategies in place to address acceptance issues
A subsequent usage of the tool can be beneficial in the sense that it makes time-dependent change processes apparent and displays the distance-travelled towards the goal of an ideal acceptance level
Summary
Employing industrial robots has been a popular means to realise a highly automated and cost-efficient production in enterprises during the last decades, leading to an increasing amount of industrial robots in factories [1]. -called collaborative robots (cobots) represent a relatively new technology that became commercially available around five till ten years ago [2] Their implemented safety features enable humans to collaborate with cobots within a shared working space including direct physical contact which is for example necessary to realise handovers of work pieces or programming via hand-guiding. Thereby we try to answer the questions, which influential acceptance factors in the HRI context exist (Section 2), how these factors can be integrated in a tool for practitioners to address employee acceptance (Section 3), and how company representatives evaluate the tool’s practical usefulness in the context of their daily business (Section 4)
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