Work involving human-robot collaboration is an increasingly prevalent work configuration in U.S. manufacturing industries. Since co-robots and workers perform tasks in close proximity, it is not an option to isolate workers from co-robots to avoid accidents, as has been the practice in the past. To date, multiple engineering approaches, including limiting robot speed and eliminating sharp features on the robot, have been implemented in industrial co-robot design to promote the safety of workers. However, the overall risk in human-robot collaboration remains a concern because human workers have limited experience working with co-robot teammates. This award supports fundamental research to provide the new knowledge needed to develop intervention methods to promote the safety awareness and mental health of workers during human-robot collaborations. As the market for collaborative robots is expected to rapidly grow in the next decade, results from this research will benefit workplace safety in the U.S. The research involves multiple disciplines, including occupational safety, cognitive science, computer vision, operations research, and production automation. This multidisciplinary approach will help broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research and strengthen engineering and safety education.
Psychological evidence has revealed that monotonous human-robot collaboration tasks can lead to decreased safety awareness. Human-robot collaboration can also increase workers’ greater mental health risks, as workers treat co-robots as social entities. This research systematically investigates workers' situational awareness and mental stress states in response to interactions with co-robots. The research team will investigate algorithms that interpret video images to enable co-robots to recognize workers' situational awareness and mental stress, thereby enabling the co-robot to perform safety interventions without increasing the mental stress of their human coworkers. Experiments with co-robots will be conducted to evaluate the performance and implementation feasibility of the safety intervention methods.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
