[2303.05539] Enhancing Human-robot Collaboration by Exploring Intuitive Augmented Reality Design Representations

As the use of Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance interactions between human
agents and robotic systems in a work environment continues to grow, robots must
communicate their intents in informative yet straightforward ways. This
improves the human agent’s feeling of trust and safety in the work environment
while also reducing task completion time. To this end, we discuss a set of
guidelines for the systematic design of AR interfaces for Human-Robot
Interaction (HRI) systems. Furthermore, we develop design frameworks that would
ride on these guidelines and serve as a base for researchers seeking to explore
this direction further. We develop a series of designs for visually
representing the robot’s planned path and reactions, which we evaluate by
conducting a user survey involving 14 participants. Subjects were given
different design representations to review and rate based on their
intuitiveness and informativeness. The collated results showed that our design
representations significantly improved the participants’ ease of understanding
the robot’s intents over the baselines for the robot’s proposed navigation
path, planned arm trajectory, and reactions.