Evaluation of Human-Robot Collaboration Using Gaze based Situation Awareness in Real-time

Human attention processes play a major role in the optimization of human-robot collaboration (HRC) systems. This work describes a novel framework to assess the human factors state of the operator primarily by gaze and in real-time. The objective is to derive parameters that determine information about situation awareness which represents a central concept in the evaluation of interaction strategies in collaboration. The control of attention provides measures of human executive functions that enable to characterize key features in the collaboration domain. Comprehensive experiments on HRC were conducted with typical tasks including collaborative pick- and -place in a lab based prototypical manufacturing environment. The methodology measures executive functions and situation awareness (SART) in the HRC task in real-time for human factors based performance optimization in HRC applications.