Olivier Hugues

Assessing the acceptability of human-robot co-presence on assembly lines: A comparison between actual situations and their virtual reality counterparts

This paper focuses on the acceptability of human-robot collaboration in industrial environments. A use case was designed in which an operator and a robot had to work side-by-side on automotive assembly lines, with different levels of co-presence. This use case was implemented both in a physical and in a virtual situation using virtual reality. A user study was conducted with operators from the automotive industry. The operators were asked to assess the acceptability to work side-by-side with the robot through questionnaires, and physiological measures (heart rate and skin conductance) were taken during the user study. The results showed that working close to the robot imposed more constraints on the operators and required them to adapt to the robot. Moreover, an increase in skin conductance level was observed after working close to the robot. Although no significant difference was found in the questionnaires results between the physical and virtual situations, the increase in physiological measures was significant only in the physical situation. This suggests that virtual reality may be a good tool to assess the acceptability of human-robot collaboration and draw preliminary results through questionnaires, but that physical experiments are still necessary to a complete study, especially when dealing with physiological measures.

Determining the Important Subjective Criteria in the Perception of Human-Like Robot Movements Using Virtual Reality

This paper deals with the design and the evaluation of human-like robot movements. Three criteria were proposed and evaluated regarding their impact on the human-likeness of the robot movements: The inertia of the base, the inertia of the end-effector and the velocity profile. A specific tool was designed to generate different levels of anthropomorphism according to these three parameters. An industrial use case was designed to compare several robot movements. This use case was implemented with a virtual robot arm in a virtual environment, using virtual reality. A user study was conducted to determine what were the important criteria in the perception of human-like robot movements and what were their correlations with other notions such as safety and preference. The results showed that inertia on the end-effector was of most importance for a movement to be perceived as human-like and nonaggressive, and that those characteristics helped the users feel safer, less stressed and more willing to work with the robot.

Improving shape perception in virtual reality systems using toed-in cameras

Nowadays, actual stereoscopic 3D renderers use two cameras to render images to the screen. These two cameras have parallel optical axis. It is well know that if cameras converge, then it produces distortions called vertical parallaxes. These distortions are supposed to stress visual system, but we do not know the effect on perception. In this article, we will test if these vertical parallaxes can improve shape perception. We found out that vertical parallaxes does improve shape perception, but the effect is decreased when the object is far from the user because when the cameras converge far away it get closer to a parallel configuration.