Purposeful Communication in Human–Robot Collaboration: A Review of Modern Approaches in Manufacturing

Abstract

The uncertainties arising from the imperfection of the shared understanding during human-robot collaboration (HRC) is a critical challenge in developing real-world robots, which has attracted attention in various fields, especially in the manufacturing sector. Many research efforts have explored several key components and elements of HRC to reduce uncertainties. However, these efforts are mostly isolated from each other and few attempts have been made to develop generic frameworks to combine them for better HRC frameworks. This article contributes to this issue by reviewing the components of HRC research and developing a generic framework of purposeful communication to better arrive at a common view of uncertainties and collaboratively deal with those required by the tasks at hand holistically. The aspects of HRC components that can affect the shared understanding of humans and robots include the type of collaborative task, communication modalities, and decision-making of robots. After examining these aspects, we re-positioned the central problem to the cause of these uncertainties and proposed a new categorization of the available HRC scenarios considering communication channels, because communication strategies should be the main focus for reducing these uncertainties. This categorization will help to design better HRC frameworks that will lead to improving shared understanding and task performance, reducing uncertainties, and establishing trust, transparency, and safety. This paper proposes a comprehensive literature review and a new categorization of the currently used communication approaches by analyzing forty-nine selected articles from a wide range of articles in various databases.