Collaboration with Highly Automated Vehicles via Voice Interaction and Augmented Reality: A VR-Based Study

In future confined industrial contexts (hubs), highly automated vehicles and human operators may work in shared spaces and collaborate on joint tasks. This will probably generate a demand for new user interfaces between humans and machines that need to be designed to facilitate high levels of safety and efficiency as well as a positive user experience (UX). The present work investigates the potential of using a combination of voice interaction (VI) and visual augmented reality (AR) to support collaboration between automated vehicles and humans manually operating a machine. A concept using VI and AR for a loading scenario in a logistic center was created and evaluated using a VR headset to provide an immersive experience. A user study with 18 forklift drivers was conducted. Our study shows that the concept generated high scores in terms of usability and UX, which indicates a promising potential to use VI and AR to facilitate interaction between human machine operators and unmanned highly automated vehicles when performing collaborative tasks. Our study also implies a need to explore the design and implementation of more complex and social VI for users in logistic centers.