Usability Study through a Human-Robot Collaborative Workspace Experience

The use of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial and academic settings facilitates physical and cognitive interaction with operators. This framework is a challenge to determine how measures on concepts, such as usability, can be adapted to these new environments. Usability is a quality attribute prevalent in the field of human-computer interaction concerning the context of use and the measure of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of products and systems. In this work, the importance of the role of benchmarking usability with collaborative robots is discussed. The introduced approach is part of a general methodology for studying people and robots’ performance in collaboration. It is being designed and developed on a concrete experience into a human-robot collaborative workspace. Outcomes from the study include a list of steps, resources, recommen-dations, and some customized questionnaires to obtain cobot-oriented usability analysis and case study results.
This work has been co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union in the framework of the ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia 2014–2020, grant number 001-P-001643. Prof. Cecilio Angulo has been partly supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 825619 (AI4EU). Prof. Pere Ponsa has been partly supported by the Project EXPLainable Artificial INtelligence systems for health and well-beING (EXPLAINING) (PID2019-104829RA-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).