The research paper on "Usability Evaluation of an Augmented Reality System for Collaborative Fabrication between Multiple Humans and Industrial Robots" was awarded the Best Paper Honourable Mention Award at the ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction 2023.
IntCDC researchers Xiliu Yang (ICD) and Aimee Sousa Calepso (VISUS) presented the paper on October 14th, at the SUI’23 conference in Sydney, Australia.
The presented research is part of the IntCDC Research Project RP4-2 – Cyber-Physical Fabrication: Fluid Fabrication and the related Associated Project AP 29 – AR-Informed Collaborative Timber (Pre-)Fabrication.
Abstract
Semi-automated timber fabrication tasks demand the expertise and dexterity of human workers in addition to the use of automated robotic systems. In this paper, we introduce a human-robot collaborative system based on Augmented Reality (AR). To assess our approach, we conducted an exploratory user study on a head-mounted display (HMD) interface for task sharing between humans and an industrial robotic platform (N=16). Instead of screen-based interfaces, HMDs allowed users to receive information in-situ, regardless of their location in the workspace and the need to use their hands to handle tools or carry out tasks. We analyzed the resulting open-ended, qualitative user feedback as well as the quantitative user experience data. From the results, we derived challenges to tackle in future implementations and questions that need to be investigated to improve AR-based HRI in fabrication scenarios. The results also suggest that some aspects of human-robot interaction, like communication and trust, are more prominent when implementing a non-dyadic scenario and dealing with larger robots. The study is intended as a prequel to future work into AR-based collaboration between multiple humans and industrial robots.
Please find the related puplication here:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3607822.3614528
Yang, X., Sousa Calepso, A. ,Amtsberg, F., Menges, A., Sedlmair, M.: 2023, "Usability Evaluation of an Augmented Reality System for Collaborative Fabrication between Multiple Humans and Industrial Robots", Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 18, 1–10.
Many congratulations to all authors involved!
ACM SUI brings together top researchers and practitioners from around the world who focus on spatial interaction for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and for ubiquitous, intelligent/smart and real environments. SUI is a premier venue for presenting research on the design and use of technologies that focus on the challenges of interacting with the volumetric, 3D space we live in. This considers both spatial input and spatial output, with an emphasis on issues of human-centred interaction.