Concept and development of a user interface for human-robot collaboration during a safety briefing

Abstract: Collaboration between humans and robots - also known as human-robot collaboration (HRC) - is revolutionizing the way we work and produce and will become increasingly important in the future. The basic idea of HRC is to combine the strengths of humans and robots. Regarding this future field, a considerable amount of attention is being paid to collaborative robots, so called cobots. These robots are intended for direct human-robot interaction within a shared space respectively defined collaboration space (e.g., EN ISO 10218-2). Direct collaboration can be controlled in different ways, for example via user interfaces. Today, graphical user interfaces are often chosen for this. In the presented paper, the question should be highlighted whether there are also situations in which a cobot itself operates a user interface. This seems to make particular sense if the cobot can offer added social value, for example in the areas of service, care or education. In elderly care, for example, a cobot can increase people's independence and accessibility by helping them to operate a cell phone or a tablet to stay in contact with their beloved or receive telemedical support. Using a cobot within this interaction, the cobot could show the person how to achieve their goal or choose the correct steps, instead of controlling the application directly via programming commands which can be challenging for the user. Hence, in this case the cobot acts as a tutor or friend together with the user. However, there is currently a gap in literature regarding this topic. For this reason, a user interface that is operated directly by a cobot was designed and investigated. The user interface is a newly developed short serious game called “SafetyBot”, which conveys safety instructions in a playful way. The idea was, that a social robot, which is positioned opposite the user, operates the game together with the user. During the developmental processes we faced various challenges regarding choosing the right robot and how to interact together on one user interface. These challenges and the resulting solutions, which then served as the basis for the evaluation in an experiment with users shall be described in more detail in this paper. The insights gained within this process provide a basis for future research on this topic and help with the integration of cobots into everyday life.

Keywords: human-robot collaboration, user interface, concept and development, safety briefing

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005805

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