Leveraging gesture-based controls within a remote interface for automated material handling operations presents a promising avenue to optimize experience in outdoor environments. We present a gesture-based interactive system designed to facilitate collaboration between a human operator and a semi-autonomous forklift in material handling processes. Our interface supports commands that include starting the forklift, defining the loading/unloading area and the amount of pallets that need to be transported. We tested and compared the proposed solution to a touch-based User Interface in a field study to explore its effectiveness and identify potential challenges for implementation and adoption in industrial real-world settings.

Robots are expected to be integrated into human workspaces, which makes the development of effective and intuitive interaction crucial. While vision- and speech-based robot interfaces have been well studied, direct physical interaction has been less explored. However, HCI research has shown that direct manipulation interfaces provide more intuitive and satisfying user experiences, compared to other interaction modes. This work examines how built-in force/torque sensors in robots can facilitate direct manipulation through nudge-based interactions. We conducted a user study (N = 23) to compare this haptic approach with traditional touchscreen interfaces, focusing on workload, user experience, and usability. Our results show that haptic interactions are more engaging and intuitive but also more physically demanding compared to touchscreen interaction. These findings have implications for the design of physical human-robot interaction interfaces. Given the benefits of physical interaction highlighted in our study, we recommend that designers incorporate this interaction method for human-robot interaction, especially at close quarters.

Robots play a vital role in modern automation, with applications in manufacturing and healthcare. Collaborative robots integrate human and robot movements. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that interactions involve qualified, and thus identified, individuals. This study delves into a new approach: identifying individuals through robot arm movements. Different from previous methods, users guide the robot, and the robot senses the movements via joint sensors. We asked 18 participants to perform six gestures, revealing the potential use as unique behavioral traits or biometrics, achieving F1-score up to 0.87, which suggests direct robot interactions as a promising avenue for implicit and explicit user identification.

This work aims to create a software platform that can manage dynamic changes in the configuration and functionalities of a modular robot that is currently in development, simulate its final appearance and behavior in augmented reality, and evaluate its usability through a user study. We developed a software platform for a modular collaborative robot where users can add, remove, and swap modules without code changes. The software platform displays possible functions based on the current configuration of modules. To enable 3D interaction with the robot’s digital twin in real-time, we utilized an AR environment with the HoloLens. We conducted a user study with 28 participants without prior knowledge of robotics to evaluate the software’s usability and user experience for non-experts. The study results indicate that the software platform was well-received and user-friendly, with the digital twin in an AR environment providing a realistic robot simulation. Participants’ subjective feedback on usability, user experience, and cognitive workload of different software components was collected, and the analysis showed that the platform is suitable for non-experts. The results showed that our design of the platform and its UI is well-accepted and easy to use, shown by a SUS score of 74.29. We show how we built our software platform, as well as the simulation in AR. Moreover, we propose the practice of using AR simulation to design the software platform before future physical prototype development, in order to test different scenarios, and possibly inform the physical design. Finally, we recommend that future work explores usability with a more diverse set of non-expert users, as well as different tasks.