Methods for Providing Indications of Robot Intent in Collaborative Human-Robot Tasks

Human-robot collaboration is becoming more common in factories. In this paper, we present our designs for methods for providing information to a person about the robot's intent before the robot moves into the shared work space. We discuss our plan for a human-subjects study to determine which methods are best to express the robot's intent in an easily understandable way. Our study is also designed to determine the optimal distance from the work space to show signals of intent on the robot itself. The goal of our work is to improve efficiency and safety in human-robot collaboration.