Effectiveness of environment-aware AR interfaces on task performance in a workspace setting

Nattaon Techasarntikul, Koichi Owaki, Hideyuki Shimonishi

Keywords: Augment Reality, AR glasses interface, human-robot awareness

TL;DR: Three AR glasses navigation interfaces are tested on the human-robot coexist environment setup.

Abstract:

In a human-robot coexisting environment, understanding the user's intention would help the robot plan its work efficiency, and vice versa.
Our work simulates a situation in which a user is working on a static position and a robot is operated in the same environment.
While robots can quickly make decisions, the user who is currently focused on a task may be less unaware of their surroundings and could run the risk of colliding with the robot.
Conversely, the worker may also get sidetracked while monitoring the robot's motion, leading to inattentiveness and inefficiency in their task performance.

Existing research has primarily focused on safe robot navigation, which could malfunction due to interruptions in control signals or other technical uncertainties; thus, it would be expected that humans are also notified of the robots' intentions in order to work with them efficiently.
To address the problem of human-robot awareness, we conducted an experiment to examine whether a user could focus on their work while being aware of the robot.
We developed Augment Reality (AR) glasses interfaces to inform the user of the nearby robot and conducted an experiment to study the impact of the level of information shown by AR interfaces on task performance and concentration.
The results show that users require more head turning for checking the robot position when no information-aid is provided, nevertheless, it was also found that there was no significant difference in task performance when the user was multitasking non-skilled tasks.
Among different levels of information on the AR interfaces, the users reported being more concentrated on their work when the system provided less information.
We conclude that AR interfaces help increase concentration on the task based on the subjective-rated questionnaire results. The objective measurements reveal that the AR interfaces reduce the physical demand of turning and moving the body. However, the different levels of information on each interface do not significantly affect the task performance in this study.

Submission Number: 19