The present study aims at exploring the effect of communicating robots’ intent through visual cues, to the human on a complex human-robot collaborative task. Specifically, it aims to investigate (i) whether the use of such “anticipatory cues” will have a positive effect on task efficiency, human safety and collaborating fluency, (ii) the degree of this effect with varying robots’ speed and (iii) whether a retention effect will be observed after the removal of the cues. For exploring these issues, a human - dual robot industrial assembly task was designed in a Virtual Reality simulation environment and testing was carried out by 64 volunteer participants. Results showed that communicating robots’ intent through visual cues enhanced human anticipatory behavior, resulting in a significant improvement in human safety, team efficiency and collaborative fluency, in conjunction with a favorable subjective tendency towards the robots. However, the positive effect of the anticipatory cues was not found to increase with higher robot speed. Finally, the findings suggest that prior exposure to the cues made participants more confident in coordinating with the robots, even when the cues were removed from them, thus retaining their prior efficiency but with a negative effect on safety. In summary, the study provides evidence that use of anticipatory visual cues accelerates the legibility of robot movement and fosters human confidence and familiarization. The use of anticipatory cues seems promising for high-pace, non-repetitive interactions with collaborative robots or as a training aid in more repetitive human-robot collaborative tasks.

中文翻译：

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通过视觉线索传达机器人的意图增强了人机协作中的人类预期行为


本研究旨在探索通过视觉提示将机器人的意图传达给人类对复杂人机协作任务的影响。具体来说，它旨在调查 （i） 使用此类“预期线索”是否会对任务效率、人类安全和协作流畅性产生积极影响，（ii） 这种影响的程度随着机器人速度的变化而产生，以及 （iii） 去除线索后是否会观察到保留效应。为了探索这些问题，在虚拟现实模拟环境中设计了人双机器人工业装配任务，并由 64 名志愿者参与者进行了测试。结果表明，通过视觉线索传达机器人的意图增强了人类的预期行为，从而显着提高了人类安全、团队效率和协作流畅性，同时对机器人产生了有利的主观倾向。然而，没有发现预期线索的积极影响随着机器人速度的提高而增加。最后，研究结果表明，之前接触这些线索使参与者在与机器人协调方面更有信心，即使这些线索已经从机器人身上移除，从而保持了他们之前的效率，但对安全有负面影响。总之，该研究提供了证据表明，使用预期的视觉线索可以加速机器人运动的易读性，并培养人类的信心和熟悉度。使用预期提示似乎很有希望与协作机器人进行高速、非重复的交互，或作为重复性更强的人机协作任务的训练辅助工具。