A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON COBOTS’ IMPACT ON WORKERS’ SAFETY BEHAVIOUR AND SITUATION AWARENESS

Abstract

In recent years, the adoption of collaborative robots, or cobots, to work alongside humans in a shared workplace has increased to improve overall productivity. However, there is a concern that the workers may become overly reliant on these cobots, potentially compromising their safety and situational awareness. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impacts cobots have on the workers' situation awareness and safety behaviour.

A human-subjects experiment was designed to evaluate the human-robot interaction and assess the participants' level of situation awareness, task fluency and task efficiency. The participants were assigned to collaborate with a cobot to complete sets of assembly tasks using craft sticks, and the level of autonomy given to the cobot was adjusted in each round with the purpose of observing the participants’ reaction to simulated safety hazards in the experiment.

The results showed an increase in both mean task efficiency and mean task fluency with a lower level of cobot autonomy, which suggested that the participants were more efficient and aware of the simulated safety hazards. The mean level of situation awareness also generally increased. However, it was observed that there is no significant relationship between the level of cobot autonomy and the performance variables. The study acknowledges its limitations and proposes recommendations for future research to create a safe shared workspace for human-robot interaction.