The psychological impact that robots have on workers in a physical human-robot collaboration is not well researched. This creates a risk of creating monotonous jobs for workers as more and more robots enter the workforce. To mitigate this risk, physical human-robot collaboration should be designed to have a positive psychological impact by facilitating a flow state. Flow is the experience of complete absorption into the current moment. Based on studies in other fields, a new method for designing a physical human-robot collaboration for flow has been developed. This new method was applied to an abstract blending task in which the robot assisted the human in blending. A controlled experiment was conducted to test the psychological impact that this design method had on participants. The findings provide evidence that designing for flow made the task more satisfying, as such indications were found that suggest participants were more motivated in their task, finding it more rewarding, causing them to do more of the task than required. However, no significant impact on flow was found because participants in the control group were equally focused as participants who had the task designed for flow. Nonetheless, the positive impact that designing the physical-human robot collaboration had on the motivation and satisfaction of the humans still created a positive psychological impact. This makes designing for flow a promising method for building towards a human-centered future of work.

This paper proposes a multimodal controller that interactively leverages pose and velocity control for teleoperation, designed to address workspace limitations by dynamic workspace reindexing while taking into account operator ergonomics. Dynamic workspace reindexing offers a solution to the limitations of existing approaches, such as scaling and clutching. To ensure operator ergonomics, The Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) method is used to define an Ergonomic Workspace (EW) within which the operator must remain to maintain an ergonomic posture. Within the boundaries of the EW, non-scaled pose control is used to control the follower, offering intuitive interaction with the remote environment while maintaining good operator ergonomics. Outside the EW boundaries, velocity control is applied, where the velocity of the follower is based on the force exerted by the operator on the leader haptic device, allowing the operator to dynamically reindex the follower workspace. This control mode facilitates coarse positioning of the follower between targets. A proof-of-concept demonstration shows that the proposed controller succesfully addresses workspace limitations by dynamically reindexing the follower's workspace towards target objects. Furthermore, it is shown that the controller consistently maintains good operator ergonomics during interaction with the remote environment, thereby making it a suitable option for prolonged teleoperation tasks.