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Design Guidelines for Collaborative Industrial Robot User Interfaces

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12934))

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Abstract

Collaborative industrial robot (cobot) systems are deployed to automate tasks or as a tool for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios, especially for manufacturing applications. A large number of manufacturers of this technology have entered the cobot market in recent years. Manufacturers intend to offer easy control possibilities to make cobots suitable for different user groups, but there are few evaluation tools for assessing user interface (UI) design specifically for cobots. Therefore, we propose a set of design guidelines for cobots based on existing literature on heuristics and cobot UI design. The guidelines were further developed on the basis of modified heuristic evaluations by researchers with robotics expertise, as well as interviews with cobot UI/User Experience (UX) design experts. The resulting design guidelines are intended for identification of usability problems during heuristic evaluation of the UI design of cobot systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Several usability evaluations yielded SUS scores between 50–70 for different cobot systems [8, 31], which has been argued to indicate that a product is marginal in terms of usability and should be improved [3].

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Acknowledgements

Supported by Doctoral College TrustRobots, TU Wien. The first author of this publication was responsible for the research project and writing of the publication, and was supported by the second author. We thank Hans Küffner-McCauley, Tanja Zigaert, Michael Hornáček, all paper reviewers, evaluation study participants, and interviewees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Management Science, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Helena Anna Frijns & Christina Schmidbauer

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  1. Helena Anna Frijns
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  2. Christina Schmidbauer
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Correspondence to Helena Anna Frijns .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Frijns, H.A., Schmidbauer, C. (2021). Design Guidelines for Collaborative Industrial Robot User Interfaces. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12934. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85613-7_28

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