Individual Situation Awareness to be set free from the Collaborative Robot

Abstract

Human Factors (HF) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among human and other elements of a system with the aim to optimize system performance. One important concept within HF is Situation Awareness (SA). Since the early 1990s, the original models of individual SA have been complemented by additional models of shared and distributed SA. Although SA has already been the subject of investigation in many complex socio-technical systems, there is not a great body of scientific work on SA in relation to collaborative robots (cobots). This paper explains and reviews the most relevant models and evolutions in SA thinking and examines to which extent the concept of SA, and more particularly Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA), can be applied to cobots. Individual models of cobot SA to detect human presence and predict future human activity from a cobot-centered perspective are technologically feasible and are currently applied in industrial applications. We defend that the SA within the cobot has to be of a higher order than the level of the individual human or technological agent, and needs to be ‘set free’ in order to not only be shared with human team members, but also to understand how SA is distributed throughout the system as a whole. This paper proposes to inform future cobot design with DSA analysis from a socio-technical perspective.