Human-robot collaboration in industrial applications: Safety, interaction and trust

Human-robot collaboration is a key factor for the development of factories of the future, a space in which humans and robots can work and carry out tasks together. Safety is one of the most critical aspects in this collaborative human-robot paradigm. This article describes the experiments done and results achieved by the authors in the context of the Four-ByThree project, aiming to measure the trust of workers on fenceless human-robot collaboration in industrial robotic applications as well as to gauge the acceptance of different interaction mechanisms between robots and human beings.