Study level

  • Master of Philosophy

Faculty/School

Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

Topic status

We're looking for students to study this topic.

Research centre

Supervisors

Associate Professor Jared Donovan
Position
Associate Professor
Division / Faculty
Faculty of CI, Education & Social Justice
Professor Markus Rittenbruch
Position
Professor in Interaction Design
Division / Faculty
Faculty of CI, Education & Social Justice

Overview

This project is part of the Human Robot Interaction program in the Australian Cobotics Centre, an ARC Training Centre for Collaborative Robotics in Advanced Manufacturing.

People effectively coordinate (co-located) teamwork through various social approaches that make team members aware of what they are doing or intend to do. Collaborative robots (cobots) are being introduced to the workplace to enable tight integration of human and robotic work activities, such as assisting human workers with repetitive or strenuous physical tasks. But robots may behave autonomously or semi-autonomously, and this necessitates communication about the robot’s intentions.

Introducing complex, tightly integrated tools such as cobots not only raises questions about how to support work routines effectively but, more so, how to support the coordination of these work routines in mixed teams of humans and robots.

Research activities

This MPhil project explores how to support tightly integrated co-located work between humans and robots through intention visualisation and notification. Research activities include designing and researching interaction approaches and modalities that display relevant information such as routes, planned actions, task status and safety warnings from a robot to co-located human operators.

This project will follow a co-design approach and engage users and industry stakeholders in an iterative design process involving low and medium-fidelity prototypes to rapidly explore modalities and interaction approaches.

Skills and experience

This MPhil is situated at the intersection of Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Robot Interaction.
You should have a detailed understanding of:

  • co-design approaches
  • iterative design.

It desirable that you have experience with:

  • physical prototyping
  • physical computing
  • augmented reality
  • mixed reality.

Previous experience in working with collaborative robotic systems is not critical but beneficial.

Scholarships

You may be eligible to apply for a research scholarship.

Explore our research scholarships

Keywords

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.