Introduction

Human factors in robotics is the study of principles concerning human behaviour and characteristics for efficient design, evaluation, operation and maintenance of robots. Since people and robots differ considerably in their abilities and limitations to do productive work, the knowledge of these differences should be very useful in designing interactive human-robot workspaces. In order to aid the reader throughout the book, a model for human-robot functional interactions is presented in Figure I.1. This diagram is a representation of the functional characteristics of human-robot interactions at the micro systems level.