Evaluation of Human Robot Collaboration in Masonry Work Using Immersive Virtual Environments

ABSTRACT: With the advent of collaborative robots, there is a great potential to improve work performance by human-robot collaboration in engineering tasks. Construction is no exception. Many construction tasks are based on the movement of objects (e.g., material), which are viable candidates for human-robot collaboration. However, due to the physically imposing nature of robot operations and the unstructured environments typical in construction, it is crucial to provide a safe and reliable environment for human workers when performing collaborative work with robots. In this paper, we use Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) to evaluate a human response to robots (e.g. perceived safety, trust, and team identification) while performing collaborative construction tasks with robots. By adopting IVEs, various types of robots, interactions, and tasks can be easily tested and evaluated to determine the best HRC practice, without the need to build and evaluate a physical prototype. Several experimental scenarios simulating collaborative masonry tasks were implemented using the Unity3D Game Engine and an Oculus Rift 3D Head-Mounted Display (HMD). The results demonstrate that it is important to take into account work environment of human-robot collaboration in order to understand how humans perceive robots when working with them.