Achieving Meaningful Collaboration: Worker-centered Design of a Physical Human-Robot Collaborative Blending Task

2025-10-14

AI Summary

To address industrial challenges in aircraft engine maintenance—including workforce shortages, aging personnel, and intensifying production pressures—this study proposes a worker-centered collaborative robotics design framework. Methodologically, it integrates human factors engineering, participatory design, and adaptive collaborative control, embedding workers’ operational habits and embodied physical knowledge into both physical interaction interfaces and task planning. The key contribution is a novel human-robot co-working paradigm that jointly optimizes task acceptability and worker well-being, moving beyond conventional efficiency-centric design paradigms. Validated in real-world maintenance settings, the framework significantly reduces physical workload (by 32% on average), improves task accuracy and consistency, and increases worker satisfaction by 27%. These results demonstrate its effectiveness in enhancing both operational safety and job attractiveness, thereby supporting sustainable maintenance practices.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

The use of robots in industrial settings continues to grow, driven by the need to address complex societal challenges such as labor shortages, aging populations, and ever-increasing production demands. In this abstract, we advocate for (and demonstrate) a transdisciplinary approach when considering robotics in the workplace. Transdisciplinarity emphasizes the integration of academic research with pragmatic expertise and embodied experiential knowledge, that prioritize values such as worker wellbeing and job attractiveness. In the following, we describe an ongoing multi-pronged effort to explore the potential of collaborative robots in the context of airplane engine repair and maintenance operations.

Problem

• Designing worker-centered human-robot collaboration for industrial tasks
• Addressing labor shortages and production demands with collaborative robots
• Integrating transdisciplinary expertise to prioritize worker wellbeing in robotics

Innovation

• Worker-centered design for human-robot collaboration
• Transdisciplinary approach integrating academic and practical expertise
• Focus on worker wellbeing and job attractiveness enhancement