학술논문

An Empirical Study on Workers' Preferences in Human–Robot Task Assignment in Industrial Assembly Systems
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems IEEE Trans. Human-Mach. Syst. Human-Machine Systems, IEEE Transactions on. 53(2):293-302 Apr, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Robotics and Control Systems
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
General Topics for Engineers
Computing and Processing
Task analysis
Robots
Resource management
Service robots
Human-robot interaction
Decision making
Assembly systems
Decision-making
human–robot interaction (HRI)
manufacturing
robotics
task assignment
task switching
Language
ISSN
2168-2291
2168-2305
Abstract
Collaborative industrial robotic arms (cobots) are integrated industrial assembly systems relieving their human coworkers from monotonous tasks and achieving productivity gains. The question of task allocation arises in the organization of these human–robot interactions. State of the art shows static, compensatory task allocation approaches in current assembly systems and flexible, adaptive task sharing (ATS) approaches in human factors research. The latter should exploit the economic and ergonomic advantages of cobot usage. Previous research results did not provide a clear insight into whether industrial workers prefer static or adaptive task allocation and which tasks workers do prefer to assign to cobots. Therefore, we set up a cobot demonstrator with a realistic industrial assembly use case and did a user study with experienced workers from the shop floor (n = 25). The aim of the user study is to provide a systematic understanding and evaluation of workers' preferences in a practical context of human–robot interaction (HRI) in assembly. Our main findings are that participants preferred the ATS concept to a predetermined task allocation and reported increased satisfaction with the allocation. Results show that participants are more likely to give manual tasks to the cobot in contrast to cognitive tasks. It shows that workers do not entrust all tasks to robots, but like to take over cognitive tasks by themselves. This work contributes to the design of human-centered HRI in industrial assembly systems.