An Augmented Reality Human-Robot Physical Collaboration Interface Design for Shared, Large-Scale, Labour-Intensive Manufacturing Tasks
Wesley P. Chan, Geoffrey Hanks, Maram Sakr, Tiger Zuo, H. F. Machiel Van der Loos, Elizabeth A. Croft
Abstract
This paper investigate potential use of augmented reality (AR) for physical human-robot collaboration in large-scale, labour-intensive manufacturing tasks. While it has been shown that use of AR can help increase task efficiency in teleoperative and robot programming tasks involving smaller-scale robots, its use for physical human-robot collaboration in shared workspaces and large-scale manufacturing tasks have not been well-studied. With the eventual goal of applying our AR system to collaborative aircraft body manufacturing, we compare in a user study the use of an AR interface we developed with a standard joystick for human robot collaboration in an experiment task simulating industrial carbon-fibre-reinforced-polymer manufacturing procedure. Results show that use of AR yields reduced task time and physical demand, with increased robot utilization.