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This paper introduces a persona-based design approach to create assistive human-robot workplaces for individuals with disabilities, aiming to move beyond personalized systems towards universal design. The method involves abstracting typical impairments into personas, subdividing work processes into actions, and developing strategies for each action and persona using a design thinking approach. The resulting actions are then ordered by robot assistance level and implemented in a behavior tree, allowing the workplace to adapt to individual personas.
Enable robots to adapt to a wide range of disabilities in the workplace with a new persona-based design approach that simplifies the creation of assistive human-robot systems.
Human-robot interaction is emerging as an important paradigm for integrating persons with disabilities into the workplace. While these systems can enable individuals to work, their design is mostly personalized, hindering widespread use beyond the individual user. The universal design paradigm is a central pillar of inclusive design, describing usability of systems by all. To incorporate universal design into process design for human-robot workplaces expert knowledge is required that is often not available. To simplify process design of human-robot workplaces, we propose a persona-based design approach. First, typical impairments prevalent in the workforce or particularly relevant for the processes are abstracted into personas with disabilities. The work process is subdivided into sequential actions. For each action and persona, strategies are developed to reach the action goal by a design thinking approach. The resulting actions are ordered by level of robot assistance, i.e. robot involvement, and implemented in a behavior tree. Therefore, the macro-behavior of the workplace may adapt to individual personas online. We demonstrate the method in a collaborative box folding process with a total of seven personas with disabilities. The persona-based process design shows promising results by generating more comprehensive process strategies while enabling adaptive behavior in the sense of universal design.
