Analyzing Human Visual Attention in Human-Robot Collaborative Construction Tasks

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is a promising approach to relieve workers from repetitive and physically demanding tasks and improve safety and productivity in construction. It is critical for robots to understand worker intention in order to adapt their motion to facilitate smooth HRC. Evidence has shown that visual attention reveals human intention. However, it is still unclear how visual attention is distributed in human-robot collaborative construction tasks. In this study, a pilot experiment was conducted to examine human visual attention in a wood assembly task with the assistance of a collaborative robot. A mobile eye tracker was used to collect participants' gaze movements. Data were validated and processed in terms of various metrics to analyze visual attention patterns. It is found that construction workers' visual attention is related to the detailed process of the task - around 30% of the eye gaze is located at the connector areas and the design drawing area, which is primarily relevant to their task. Furthermore, workers' attention could be affected by the movement of the robot, with their gaze following the path of robot arm and gripper during the collaboration. The findings can stimulate further research into attention-aware HRC for intelligent construction.