Ergonomic and performance factors for Human-robot collaborative workplace design and evaluation

The development of human-robot collaborative workplaces is a complex problem that has gathered the attention and effort of both industry and academia. This complexity stems from the multidisciplinary nature of the problem. Consequently, the development of workplace and collaboration design methods requires the integration of multiple sub-methods. Efficient measure, evaluation and interpretation of a significant number of variables is therefore necessary without incurring in excessive computation power demands. A number of advancements to hierarchical task analysis (HTA) are proposed in order to improve Hierarchical Task decomposition and complexity evaluation. A simple predictive ergonomic evaluation approach is proposed. Together with PTMS, this simpler ergonomic evaluation method can more easily be integrated in more complex collaborative workplace design methods. (C) 2019, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.