Cognitive Workload Evaluation of Onsite Workers Collaborating with a Teleoperated Robot during Assembly Tasks Using Heart Rate

Incorporating collaborative robots in modern industry has given rise to the synergistic collaboration between humans and robots. Working along with a teleoperated robot enables completion of tasks across geographical boundaries and has the potential to address the skills gap in manufacturing by enhancing future distributed manufacturing environments. In this study, we investigated cognitive demands of onsite workers in two different collaboration scenarios: (1) Human-Human (HH) and (2) Teleoperator-Robot-Human (tRH), during wire assembly tasks with varying physical and cognitive workloads. Under an additional cognitive task condition, the perceived effort (measured by NASA-TLX) for HH (57.8 ± 26.4) was significantly higher than for tRH (31.6 ± 26.5). However, no significant differences in heart rate were found between HH and tRH. These findings suggest that tRH might not introduce additional cognitive demands compared to HH collaboration, despite the lack of in-person and/or less direct communication.