Fostering short-term human anticipatory behavior in human-robot collaboration

Abstract

The present study reports on a human-robot collaboration experiment involving an industrial task with the specific aim of exploring the effects of (i) fostering human anticipatory behavior towards the robot, through visual cues of the robot's next move and (ii) robot adaptiveness to the human actions through reducing its motion speed with respect to human movement's proximity. For investigating these effects a generic collaborative picking and sorting task was designed, implemented and tested by volunteer participants, in a Virtual Reality simulation environment. Results demonstrated that, showing robot's intent through anticipatory cues significantly increased team efficiency, human safety and collaborative fluency in conjunction with a positive subjective inclination towards the robot. Robot adaptiveness significantly increased human safety without decreasing task efficiency and fluency, compared to a control condition.