Interactive Spatial Augmented Reality in Collaborative Robot Programming: User Experience Evaluation

This paper presents a novel approach to interaction between human workers and industrial collaborative robots. The proposed approach address problems introduced by existing solutions for robot programming. It aims to reduce the mental demands and attention switches by centering all interaction into a shared workspace, combining various modalities and enabling interaction with the system without any external devices. The concept allows simple programming in a form of setting program parameters using a spatial augmented reality for visualization and a touch-enabled table and robot arms as input devices. The final solution is distraction-free, usable and low effort interface for effective human-robot collaboration, enabling any ordinary skilled worker to customize robot program to changes in production or to personal (e.g. ergonomic) needs. We evaluated the concept utilizing a user experience study with six participants (shop-floor workers). All participants were able to program the robot and to collaborate with it using the program they parametrized.