Evaluating a Design Toolkit for Human-Robot Collaboration in Close-Proximity Scenarios with Robotic Arms: Group Usability Tests with Postgraduate Interaction Design Students

摘要

The rapid development of Industry 4.0 expands industrial robots from isolated machines to collaborative agents. Recognizing this paradigm shift, design educators are increasingly aware of the need to prepare students for effectively engaging with emerging robotic technologies and shaping future human-robot collaboration (HRC) projects. However, systematic and structured resources to guide these student designers in approaching, conceptualizing, prototyping and implementing HRC remain scarce. This article introduces a novel HRC design toolkit tailored for student designers that incorporates industrial constraints, role assignment, and guided communication into a step-by-step design process. Evaluations with 13 student interaction designers showed that the proposed toolkit clarified task flows, facilitated more intuitive robot behaviors, and bridged the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementations. Based on participants’ feedback, we improved the toolkit with simpler visual aids and improved guidance, further lowering the threshold for creating collaborative tasks. Finally, we discussed the applications and contributions of this revised design toolkit to industrial robotics education.