Impact of Spontaneous Human Inputs during Gesture based Interaction on a Real-World Manufacturing Scenario

Seamless human-robot collaboration depends on high non-verbal behaviour recognition rates. To realize that in real-world manufacturing scenarios with an ecological valid setup, a lot of effort has to be invested. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of spontaneous inputs on the robustness of human-robot collaboration during gesture-based interaction. A high share of these spontaneous inputs lead to a reduced capability to predict behaviour and subsequently to a loss of robustness. We observe body and hand behaviour during interactive manufacturing of a collaborative task within two experiments. First, we analyse the occurrence frequency, reason and manner of human inputs in specific situations during a human-human experiment. We show the high impact of spontaneous inputs, especially in situations that differ from the typical working procedure. Second, we concentrate on implicit inputs during a real-world Wizard of Oz experiment using our human-robot working cell. We show that hand positions can be used to anticipate user needs in a semi-structured environment by applying knowledge about the semi-structured human behaviour which is distributed over working space and time in a typical manner.