Augmented Reality Interface for UR5e Robot that Transfers Parts to a Human in Collaborative Assembly

Collaborative assembly is one of the most common tasks in collaborative robotics, which requires an efficient, simple and user-friendly way of communication with a collaborative robot. This paper presents an augmented reality (AR) interface for controlling a UR5e robot in order to get assembly parts from a robot’s desktop in a collaborative assembly process. This AR interface is based on the concept of a smart mirror that recognizes user’s hand gestures as control signals. A goal of the study is to investigate user perception of a contactless interaction method with a collaborative robot UR5e using the proposed AR interface. The conducted experiments involved 15 participants who are not professional operators of robots and industrial manipulators. During the experiments, the participants demonstrated a quick adaptation and an evident interest to working side by side with the UR5e robot using the AR interface. Our results suggest that the developed AR interface is flexible, intuitive for an operator, scalable in terms of development for different cases of production goals and can be recommended for equipping a workcell for collaborative assembly of various products.