Högskolan i Skövde

The increasing complexity and demands of assembly operations in manufacturing has been shown to lead to increased cognitive load in assembly workers. Previous work has outlined the complexity of an assembly worker's situation both in terms of difficulty and speed of work and there have been a few attempts at creating frameworks and methods for understanding the key aspects of what creates increased cognitive load. This paper presents the development of an analytic method, denoted CLAM (Cognitive Load Assessment for Manufacturing), and a tool for assessing cognitive load in manufacturing, primarily assembly. It outlines the journey of the development as well as discusses and problematizes relevant meta-methodological issues paired with method development. The intended contribution of the work is to make a difference in reducing the cognitive load of assembly workers on the shop floor, thus focusing the development on applicability and usability of the tool in practice. With this purpose in mind, focus of the method development has been on the practitioners, i.e. the method should not require any expert knowledge to be applied. The CLAM method and accompanying documentation such as a handbook containing instructions towards using the method and interpreting the results, is available in an online tool.

Affective touch has a fundamental role in human development, social bonding, and for providing emotional support in interpersonal relationships. We present, what is to our knowledge, the first HRI study of tactile conveyance of both positive and negative emotions (affective touch) on the Nao robot, and based on an experimental set-up from a study of human–human tactile communication. In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to a small humanoid robot via touch. We found that female participants conveyed emotions for a longer time, using more varied interaction and touching more regions on the robot’s body, compared to male participants. Several differences between emotions were found such that emotions could be classified by the valence of the emotion conveyed, by combining touch amount and duration. Overall, these results show high agreement with those reported for human–human affective tactile communication and could also have impact on the design and placement of tactile sensors on humanoid robots.

We here present results and analysis from a study of affective tactile communication between human and humanoid robot (the NAO robot). In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to the NAO via touch. In this study, we sought to understand the potential for using a wearable affective (tactile) interface, or WAffI. The aims of our study were to address the following: (i) how emotions and affective states can be conveyed (encoded) to such a humanoid robot, (ii) what are the effects of dressing the NAO in the WAffI on emotion conveyance and (iii) what is the potential for decoding emotion and affective states. We found that subjects conveyed touch for longer duration and over more locations on the robot when the NAO was dressed with WAffI than when it was not. Our analysis illuminates ways by which affective valence, and separate emotions, might be decoded by a humanoid robot according to the different features of touch: intensity, duration, location, type. Finally, we discuss the types of sensors and their distribution as they may be embedded within the WAffI and that would likely benefit Human-NAO (and Human-Humanoid) interaction along the affective tactile dimension.

The increasing complexity and demands of assembly operations in manufacturing has been shown to lead to increased cognitive load in assembly workers. Previous work has outlined the complexity of an assembly worker’s situation both in terms of difficulty and speed of work and there have been a few attempts at creating frameworks and methods for understanding the key aspects of what creates increased cognitive load. This paper presents a tool for assessing cognitive load in manufacturing, primarily assembly. The paper presents the method and an accompanying tool as well as some insights derived from this method development. The intended contribution of the work is to make a difference in reducing the cognitive load of assembly workers on the shop floor, thus focusing the development on applicability and usability of the tool in practice. 

This paper presents a study examining interruptionsin the wild by portraying the handling of interruptionsin manufacturing from a distributed cognitionlens. By studying how interruptions occur and are handledin the daily activities of a work team at a large foundry forcasting heavy diesel engines, we highlight situations whenthe propagation, transformation, and representation ofinformation are not supported by prescribed work processesand propose recommendations for how this can beamended. The study was conducted by several visits to theaforementioned factory with cognitive ethnography as thebasis for the data collection. The focus was on identifyinginterruptions and analysing these through a distributedcognition framework as an initial step towards studyinginterruptions in a manufacturing environment. The keyfindings include the identification of three, previouslyundefined, types of interruptions and the conclusion thatinterruptions do indeed affect the distributed workload ofthe socio-technical system and thus the overall productionperformance at the casting line.

In order to deepen the understanding of the intrinsic interactions andinterplay between humans, tools, and environment from a systemsperspective, research in the wild (RITW) approaches have gainedtraction during recent decades as they provide a higher ecologicalvalidity of findings. This paper presents a RITW study, investigatinghow assembly, in this case dock assembly of forwarders, was donein practice. As our theoretical foundation, we used the framework ofdistributed cognition, which is one of the main pillars of RITW. Thefindings are presented in narrative form, describing and highlightingthat the workers achieve an efficient production outcome by beingintegral parts of the whole production process and doing so throughcoordination of activities benefitting the shared goal of the distributedsocio-technical system.

Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in human society. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people’s lives, it is of major importance to stressthe need for positive user experience (UX) of such robots. The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects that emerge in the interaction between humans and robots. However, a positive UX does not appear by itself but has to be designed for and evaluated systematically. In this paper, the focus is on the role and relevance of UX in human-robot interaction (HRI) and four trends concerning the role and relevance of UX related to socially interactive robots are identified, and three challenges related to its evaluation are also presented. It is argued that current research efforts and directions are not sufficient in HRI research, and that future research needs to further address interdisciplinary research in order to achieve long-term success of socially interactive robots.

In the present study, 64 users were asked to convey eight distinct emotion to a humanoid Nao robot via touch, and were then asked to evaluate their experiences of performing that task. Large differences between emotions were revealed. Users perceived conveying of positive/pro-social emotions as significantly easier than negative emotions, with love and disgust as the two extremes. When asked whether they would act differently towards a human, compared to the robot, the users’ replies varied. A content analysis of interviews revealed a generally positive user experience (UX) while interacting with the robot, but users also found the task challenging in several ways. Three major themes with impact on the UX emerged; responsiveness, robustness, and trickiness. The results are discussed in relation to a study of human-human affective tactile interaction, with implications for human-robot interaction (HRI) and design of social and affective robotics in particular. 

The development of socially interactive robots is expected to have anincreasing importance in everyday life for a growing number of people. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people’s lives, it is of major importanceto stress the need for developing a positive user experience (UX). The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects including acceptance, usability,and credibility, as they emerge in the interaction between humans and robots. In current human-robot interaction (HRI) research, UX is reckoned to be important,but is often taken for granted. However, a positive user experience does not appearby itself but has to be systematically designed and evaluated. In this paper, we focus on the role and relevance of UX in HRI and present three challenges related to the evaluation of UX in interaction with robots, addressing the need for interdisciplinary research in order to achieve long-term success of socially interactive robots.