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About

Marco Baumgartner is a leading researcher in industrial human-robot interaction (HRI), focusing on the critical human factors that determine the success of collaborative robots in manufacturing. His work bridges the gap between technological capability and workplace reality, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Baumgartner’s most influential contribution is his empirically driven framework identifying success factors for introducing industrial HRI in practice, a foundational study with 184 citations that provides actionable guidance for companies. He has also pioneered research on how linguistic framing—whether a robot is introduced as “Paul” or simply “a robot”—shapes factory workers’ initial trust and long-term perceptions of collaborative robots, with key papers on this topic accumulating over 90 citations. His development of a web-based tool for analyzing worker acceptance offers companies a practical resource for implementation. Baumgartner’s work consistently demonstrates that trust, anthropomorphism, and fear of technological replacement are not peripheral concerns but central to successful automation. By empirically exploring the evolution of trust and distrust during real human-robot interactions, he provides essential insights for designing collaborative systems that workers actually embrace.