Design of multimodal interfaces in human-robot assembly for competence development

An increasing number of variants as well as shorter product life cycles in assembly are constantly placing new requirements on the competencies of assembly workers. Hybrid assembly, involving robots and humans, can provide support here. Nevertheless, employees' competencies are necessary for product assembly. Various interface types can be used simultaneously as multimodal interfaces to support learning processes for competence development. Thus, workers can select and use their preferred type of interaction with the system. This relieves the assembly workers' cognitive load. In this paper, criteria for the cognitive load reduction and competence development are presented. The focus are the visual, auditory and haptic system interactions. The interfaces were designed to positively influence the competence development in value-adding processes. With the developed design criteria, a human-robot workstation was created and experiments were conducted with test persons. The results of the experiments show that competence development within the value-added process is supported by the design of the interaction interfaces.