Proof of concept of a cobotic system in a constrained work environment

This study is a proof of concept that aims to measure the impacts of a human/cobot collaboration on the human and his task during a simulated chemistry assembly.

The 5th industrial revolution calls for refocusing work on the human operator, placing him or her at the center of the system. Thus, cobotic systems are increasingly implemented to support human work. In this research, we study the impact of a real-life cobot on the performance (e.g. number of errors, time completion), workload, risk exposure and acceptability of participants realizing an industrial-like assembly task.

Participants had to reproduce an assembly model with Duplos in collaboration with a cobot in a laboratory setting. The effect of the human expertise on the task (prior to the collaboration) and the level of cobot adaptation to human safety constraints on the performance at the task and on operator were tested.

The main results report that expert participants did less mistakes and were less exposed to risks than non-experts. However, both of them succeeded in the task thanks to the cobot adaptation. Also, the cobot was able to adapt to human safety constraints. This adaptation led participants to expose themselves to fewer risks. Also, contrary to previous findings, experts had a similar score of acceptability than non-experts.

This laboratory experiment is a proof of concept demonstrating that using a cobotic solution could potentially assist humans in supporting high-risk work operations.

Cobotic system designers and work designers could benefit from this research's exploratory results when supporting the design of constraints in workstations for high-risk work operations.