An Empirical Study on Workers' Preferences in Human–Robot Task Assignment in Industrial Assembly Systems

Collaborative industrial robotic arms (cobots) are integrated assembly systems relieving their human coworkers from monotonous tasks and achieving productivity gains. The question of task allocation arises in the organization these human–robot interactions. State art shows static, compensatory approaches current flexible, adaptive sharing (ATS) factors research. latter should exploit economic ergonomic advantages cobot usage. Previous research results did not provide a clear insight into whether workers prefer static or which do to assign cobots. Therefore, we set up demonstrator with realistic use case user study experienced shop floor (n = 25). aim is systematic understanding evaluation workers' preferences practical context interaction (HRI) assembly. Our main findings that participants preferred ATS concept predetermined reported increased satisfaction allocation. Results show more likely give manual contrast cognitive tasks. It entrust all robots, but like take over by themselves. This work contributes design human-centered HRI systems.