In future confined industrial contexts (hubs), highly automated vehicles and human operators may work in shared spaces and collaborate on joint tasks. This will probably generate a demand for new user interfaces between humans and machines that need to be designed to facilitate high levels of safety and efficiency as well as a positive user experience (UX). The present work investigates the potential of using a combination of voice interaction (VI) and visual augmented reality (AR) to support collaboration between automated vehicles and humans manually operating a machine. A concept using VI and AR for a loading scenario in a logistic center was created and evaluated using a VR headset to provide an immersive experience. A user study with 18 forklift drivers was conducted. Our study shows that the concept generated high scores in terms of usability and UX, which indicates a promising potential to use VI and AR to facilitate interaction between human machine operators and unmanned highly automated vehicles when performing collaborative tasks. Our study also implies a need to explore the design and implementation of more complex and social VI for users in logistic centers.
The work was funded by the Swedish partnership program Strategic Vehicle Research and Innovation (FFI) (Grant no: 2019-05898). It was conducted in a collaboration between Scania, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Boliden Mineral, AFRY and Icemakers.