Abstract
Industrial robot programming tools increasingly rely on graphical interfaces, which aim at rendering the programming task more accessible to a wide variety of users. The usability of such tools is currently being evaluated in controlled environments, such as laboratories or companies, in which a group of participants is asked to carry out several tasks using the tool and then fill out a standardized questionnaire. In this context, this paper proposes and evaluates an alternative evaluation methodology, which leverages online crowdsourcing platforms to produce the same results as face-to-face evaluations. We applied the proposed framework in the evaluation of a web-based industrial robot programming tool called Assembly. Our results suggest that crowdsourcing facilitates a cost-effective, result-oriented, and reusable methodology for performing user studies anonymously and online.
Highlights
The “fourth industrial revolution” or Industry 4.0 and its embodiment as the “digital factory” depicts the softening of limits between the physical, digital, and natural universes.Industry 4.0 combines advances in AI, IoT, robotics, 3D printing, genetic engineering, quantum computing, and other technologies
As this paper aims to develop a framework for the usability evaluation of web-based robotic programming environments, ref. [32] designed an entire web-based framework built in a robot, laboratory, and interface-independent manner, which was created to greatly reduce the overhead and costs of running remote user studies, which involve remote control of the robot [11]
The present work introduced a methodological framework for conducting user studies with the help of online crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk)
Summary
The “fourth industrial revolution” or Industry 4.0 and its embodiment as the “digital factory” depicts the softening of limits between the physical, digital, and natural universes.Industry 4.0 combines advances in AI, IoT, robotics, 3D printing, genetic engineering, quantum computing, and other technologies. One of the pillars of Industry 4.0 is represented by human–robot collaboration. This form of collaboration requires extensive research, which is not focused on robotics alone and on user-centered, simplified robot programming as a strong foundation for smooth human–machine interaction (HRI) [1]. The field of industrial robotics has progressed in the past decade, with companies looking to embrace this technology in diversified areas as it brings a high return on investment in a short time, increases productivity and velocity, and reduces the risk of human error caused mainly by the monotony and repetitiveness of tasks. In contrast to human workers, would mean a single more considerable initial investment in the hardware, which can later be employed 24 h/day, keep the entire machinery operating even without the physical presence of human workers, master repetitive tasks quickly, and even specialize in customizable ones
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