A MULTIMODAL VIRTUAL REALITY SET-UP FOR HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN OF INDUSTRIAL WORKSTATIONS

Abstract

Although the so-called Industry 4.0 trend is promoting the increasing automation of processes in the factories of the future, manual activities still play an extremely important role within the factory and human factors greatly affect the process performance. However, the analysis of human-machine interaction and the prediction of human performance in industry are difficult but crucial to have an optimized design of workspaces and interfaces, reducing time and cost of implementation, and avoiding late design changes. This research adopts a multimodal human-centered approach for the analysis of human-machine interaction, and proposes a multimodal experimental set-up for the evaluation of the workers’ experience to support the design of industrial workstations. The set-up combines virtual mock-ups, interaction with both physical and virtual objects, and monitoring sensors to track users and analyze their actions and reactions. It allows creating a multimodal environment able to deepen the interaction between humans and systems or interfaces, to support design activities. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that the analysis of the reactions of the users involved, allows to evaluate the quality of the interaction, identify the critical issues, define corrective actions, and propose guidelines for system design or redesign [1]. The paper describes the application of the proposed set-up on two industrial case studies and reports the main results. Keywords: Virtual Reality, Human Factors, Human-Centered Design, Digital Manufacturing, Industry 4.0.