Evaluation of Human-Robot Interaction Quality: A Toolkit for Workplace Design

Abstract

The working world is facing a constant change. New technologies emerge enabling new forms of human-system interactions. Especially autonomous robots in services industries as well as manufacturing settings create novel forms of human-robot interaction. Not only researchers but also system integrators as well as practitioners are confronted with the question how to analyze, to evaluate and finally how to design these new working systems in a human-centered way. In this paper we present evaluation criteria as well as a toolkit with concrete measures in order to enable a holistic evaluation of cognitive aspects in human-robot-interactions in work related scenarios. The evaluation criteria comprise technology and human related parameters. Further the paper presents a first empirical validation of the evaluation criteria and their measurements. The validation study uses a manual assembly task accomplished with a lightweight robot. The results indicate that the evaluation criteria can be used to describe the quality of the human-robot interaction.