Augmented reality user interface design and experimental evaluation for human-robot collaborative assembly

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied to a wide spectrum of industrial sectors, but manual operations remain indispensable in most manufacturing systems due to high complexity or costs involving in automation. A more practical approach is enabling humans to collaborate with machines complementary to each other. One critical issue in human-robot collaboration (HRC) is to assure the operator's productivity, safety, and trust while interacting with the robot. This paper presents an experimental study on user interface design in augmented reality (AR) for human-robot collaborative assembly in a shared workspace. The experiment aims to verify and cross-compare the effectiveness of visual and haptic cues in various forms that convey the robot intent to human. Analysis of the work performance and gazing behavior of participants shows that both cues can reduce their visual attention on the moving robot during the collaboration. The interface that provides the proximity of robot using visual cues is considered most useful. It is not intuitive to recognize complex information by vibration on different parts of the human hand in the experiment. Finally, human trust to robot has a higher correlation on the usability of a user interface than the work performance assisted by the interface. These findings may work as design guidelines for AR assisted human-robot interaction in smart manufacturing.