Using Augmented Reality in Human-Robot Assembly: A Comparative Study of Eye-Gaze and Hand-Ray Pointing Methods

Abstract

Collaborative robots (cobots) are a promising technology for frontline workers in industry. They can support tasks that cannot be fully automated but are repetitive, fatiguing, boring, or dangerous for humans. Although cobots are explicitly designed to work with humans, they remain primarily non-intuitive and difficult to collaborate with. Thus, there is a need for new interaction approaches to facilitate efficient human-robot collaboration. Recently, we could see emerging examples of using augmented reality (AR) to assist a worker in collaborative task execution with a cobot. However, for such an approach to provide truly efficient support for the seamless bimanual task execution, we need to first investigate interaction methods offered by an AR interface. To that end, we performed a study with sixteen participants to compare eye-gaze and hand-ray pointing methods for part selection in collaborative, manual assembly tasks. The results of our study show that both techniques provide similar perceived usability, with the eye-gaze selection leading to significantly shorter completion times.

BibTeX

				
					@INPROCEEDINGS{10802282,
  author={Tadeja, Sławomir K. and Zhou, Tianye and Capponi, Matteo and Walas, Krzysztof and Bohné, Thomas and Forni, Fulvio},
  booktitle={2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}, 
  title={Using Augmented Reality in Human-Robot Assembly: A Comparative Study of Eye-Gaze and Hand-Ray Pointing Methods}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={8786-8793},
  doi={10.1109/IROS58592.2024.10802282}}
				
			
APA Reference

S. K. Tadeja, T. Zhou, M. Capponi, K. Walas, T. Bohné and F. Forni, “Using Augmented Reality in Human-Robot Assembly: A Comparative Study of Eye-Gaze and Hand-Ray Pointing Methods,” 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2024, pp. 8786-8793, doi: 10.1109/IROS58592.2024.10802282

 

Cyber-human Lab Contributors

Dr Sławomir Tadeja

Dr Slawomir K. Tadeja is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Here, he works...

Dr Thomas Bohné

Thomas Bohné is the founder and head of the Cyber-Human Lab at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. He is also leading research...