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Chen, Delun

University of British Columbia

Carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) has been widely used in the automotive and aerospace industries. The current manufacturing process associated with vacuum bagging requires at least two trained technicians with expertise to manually manipulate the materials. To alleviate the physical demands on technicians, a robot arm with end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) was developed to collaborate with them and assist with pleat formation and migration tasks. However, encountering this robot without prior understanding of its behaviour can lead to frustration, confusion, or a high learning curve. This thesis evaluates robot visual cues designed for human-robot collaboration in the context of a simulated CFRP manufacturing vacuum bagging process. By communicating gripper force information to technicians, these cues aim to enhance the interpretability of the robot's behaviour and reduce the workload experienced during the human-robot interaction. This study first implemented the mechatronic system to control the robot's gripper force under both semi-automatic and automatic pleating modes, and then developed four visual cues based on light brightness, colour gradient, loading progress bar, and flashing light to convey system status to the operator under both modes. The results indicate that the colour gradient and loading progress bar are significantly more suitable for indicating gripper force compared to the other patterns. These patterns exhibit significantly higher legibility, intuitiveness and interactivity, leading to reduced human perceived mental load, effort, and frustration. Participants prefer operating the robot using the automatic mode, which improves the overall performance of the robot. Additionally, all designed cues outperform the no cue condition, highlighting the importance of visual feedback for users to understand the robot’s behaviour during human-robot collaboration.

Text

2023-09-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85882

Mechanical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/