Assessing risk of AR and organizational changes factors in socio-technical robotic manufacturing

Abstract

Technological changes such as the use of Augmented Reality (AR) along with the advent of new organizational changes such as digitalization are on the one hand positively changing the way of working but on the other hand they are introducing new risks, potentially leading to not only normal but also post-normal accidents. In our previous work, we have incrementally proposed a novel framework, called FRAAR, for risk assessment of AR-equipped socio-technical systems (i.e., systems integrating human, organizational and technical entities (such as AR)). We have also partly evaluated our framework via an industrial automotive study and by providing comparison and positioning with respect to other related works in a systematic literature review. In this paper, we conduct a new study to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of our framework in a different domain. To do that, we choose a digitalized socio-technical factory system, focusing on the human–robot collaboration for a realistic diesel engine assembly task using AR-based user interface in an organization affected by organizational changes. Then, we design and execute our study to apply our framework and we discuss about the extent the conceptualizations provided by the framework are effective to capture the essential information for risk assessment in socio-technical robotic manufacturing, the extent the robotic safety standards are supported (to demonstrate the applicability of the framework in the robotic domain) and the extent of effectiveness of the risk assessment with respect to AR and organizational changes. Finally, we discuss about validity of our work and we provide our findings and intended future work.