Physical and Mental Workload Assessment in Human-Robot Collaboration Workplaces - A Review

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) systems are often chosen to improve ergonomics in manual tasks. There are many metrics available to quantify the ergonomic benefits when implementing an HRC. It is important to understand which metrics (ergonomic methods, tests, questionnaires) are being used by researchers in terms of physical and mental workloads assessment. Therefore, this work aimed to review the literature on the subject and to provide key information for further investigations. A literature review was carried out in four databases and the findings were categorized into theoretical surveys and empirical studies from the last five years. Results show the emerging research fields that were identified and analyzed. The metrics used to assess physical and mental workloads were discussed and a new meaning for these results is proposed in the sense of using a global ergonomic risk assessment as input in simulation models.