Usability study of a robot companion for monitoring industrial processes

Sita, Enrico; Thomessen, Trygve; Pipe, Anthony G.; Studley, Matthew; Dailami, Farid

Abstract

In this paper we present the findings of a usability study for a monitoring robotic unit tele-operated via a virtual fixtures (VF) based control framework. The study aims at investigating the impact of VF on the robot navigation as well as the impact of multimodal feedback on the user performance in a static inspection task. The findings will help in the design of the monitoring control framework to inspect a robotised welding process, as it has been researched in previous work. The study has been conducted with untrained participants, involved in four different test scenarios. The experiments treated a static case in which users were asked to navigate the monitoring robot in the workspace to find a lit LED of a test-piece. The statistical analysis of the experiment metrics showed a positive impact of the VF control on the navigation of the monitoring robot even for users with no previous experience. Moreover, from the analysis of the task load index forms (TLX) it emerged that the combination of VF control and additional multimodal feedback improved the user performance without negatively impacting the effort required to accomplish the task.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2020 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems, ACIRS 2020
• Start Date: Jul 17, 2020
• End Date: Jul 19, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Mar 25, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Aug 10, 2020
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Aug 18, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 27, 2020
• Pages: 37-42
• Book Title: 2020 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems (ACIRS)
• ISBN: 9781728198187
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/acirs49895.2020.9162607
• Keywords: Monitoring , Task analysis , Service robots , Fixtures , Robot sensing systems , Usability
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/6544286