Impact of verbal instructions and deictic gestures of a cobot on the performance of human coworkers

This paper investigates the effectiveness and efficiency of incorporating pointing gestures as well as handspeech synchronization policies into instruction delivery, as would be used in an industrial case with a cobot. Through brick assembly tasks, our study explores the integration of pointing gestures into human-robot interaction, extending prior research on verbal instruction efficacy. Results show that pointing gestures significantly reduce errors compared to verbal instructions alone, especially for complex tasks. However, this improvement comes at the cost of increased task completion time. We also show that depending on this synchronization, the user might delay its action until all information is presented instead of exploiting the information as it arrived. This study emphasizes the potential of pointing gestures and hand-speech synchronization in improving human-robot interaction and suggests further research for optimal integration.