Kinesthetic Teaching in Assembly Operations – A User Study

Abstract

Kinesthetic teaching is a commonly employed method for programming robots using the Programming by Demonstration (PbD) paradigm. It is widely regarded as an intuitive approach to robot programming, which can be performed by shop-floor workers. Much research in this area has focused on pick-and-place tasks while demanding assembly tasks have received less attention so far. Nonetheless, in various contributions kinesthetic teaching is utilized to gain insight into human assembly strategies by deriving trajectories, mating forces, etc. To evaluate the discrepancies between kinesthetic teaching and manual assembly in the context of industrial assembly tasks, we conducted a user study with 78 participants featuring four different tasks. Our results confirm the ease of learning attributed to kinesthetic teaching but also suggest that trying to transfer human assembly strategies using this method may suffer from a substantial flaw.