Designing an AR interface to improve trust in Human-Robots collaboration

In a global, e-commerce marketplace, product customisation is driven towards manufacturing flexibility. Conventional caged robots are designed for high volume and low mix production cannot always comply with the increasing low volume and high customisation requirements. In this scenario, the interest in collaborative robots is growing. A critical aspect of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is human trust in robots. This research focuses on increasing the human confidence and trust in robots by designing an Augmented Reality (AR) interface for HRC. The variable affecting the trust involved in HRC have been estimated. These have been utilised for designing the AR-HRC. The proposed design aims to provide situational awareness and spatial dialog. The AR-HRC developed has been tested on 15 participants which have performed a “pick-and-place” task. The results show that the utilisation of AR in the proposed scenario positively affects the human trust in robot. The human-robot collaboration enhanced by AR are more natural and effective. The trust has been measured through an empirical psychometric method also presented in this paper.