A Review on Human Comfort Factors, Measurements, and Improvements in Human–Robot Collaboration

Abstract

As the development of robotics technologies for collaborative robots (COBOTs), the applications of human–robot collaboration (HRC) have been growing in the past decade. Despite the tremendous efforts from both academia and industry, the overall usage and acceptance of COBOTs are still not so high as expected. One of the major affecting factors is the comfort of humans in HRC, which is usually less emphasized in COBOT development; however, it is critical to the user acceptance during HRC. Therefore, this paper gives a review of human comfort in HRC including the influential factors of human comfort, measurement of human comfort in terms of subjective and objective manners, and human comfort improvement approaches in the context of HRC. Discussions on each topic are also conducted based on the review and analysis.

Keywords

• human comfort
• human–robot collaboration
• comfort measurement
• comfort improvement
• wearable sensing