Attention Analysis for Assistance in Assembly Processes

Human attention processes play a major role in the optimization of human-machine interaction (HMI) systems. This work describes a suite of innovative components within a novel framework in order to assess the human factors state of the human operator primarily by gaze and in real-time. The objective is to derive parameters that determine information about situation awareness of the human collaborator that represents a central concept in the evaluation of interaction strategies in collaboration. The human control of attention provides measures of executive functions that enable to characterize key features in the domain of human-machine collaboration. This work presents a suite of human factors analysis components (the Human Factors Toolbox) and its application in the assembly processes of a future production line. Comprehensive experiments on HMI are described which were conducted with typical tasks including collaborative pick-and-place in a lab based prototypical manufacturing environment.