Collaborative Research: NRI: Reducing Falling Risk in Robot-Assisted Retail Environments

Occupational injuries continue to adversely affect the wholesale and retail workforce with persistently high incidence rates and injury counts, especially fall-related injuries. Previous work has indicated that occupational falling can be primarily attributed to a lack of understanding of the walking surfaces, such as floors. Robots can be used not only to assess the walking surface better than humans, but also can convey important safety related information more effectively to co-workers as well as customers.

The main goal of this project is to investigate the health and safety implications of the wholesale and retail crew collaboratively working with robots in a typical retail environment, and use these opportunities to reduce personnel falling injuries. Compared to other occupational settings where robotics and automation have been flourishing, this environment presents challenges to be addressed before a comparable widespread adoption of robots can be established.

From the robotics systems point of view, the research team aims to substantially reduce the falling risk exposure by providing a real-time walkability map to people in the environment. From the safety perspective, the research team will focus on comprehensive safety, workload influence, and the psychological impacts on retail workers and customers when working with/around mobile robots under varied circumstances.

There are three research thrusts to pursue in this research work: Thrust 1 - identify and evaluate the risks associated with the operation of mobile robots in retail environments under different operating conditions. Thrust 2 - develop a new function that could augment a wide range of retail robots to survey the indoor ground surface while performing primary functions such as cleaning and inventory checking.

Outputs will be integrated to generate an indoor space walkability map informing the surrounding pedestrians of potential risks of slipping or tripping. Thrust 3 - investigate the effects of mobile robots and the walkability map on workers’ physical falling risk exposure, cognitive workload and psychological impacts in real-world retail sites. In addition, the research team will evaluate if the falling prevention function can improve the overall technology acceptance among professional workers and eventually lower the technology adoption barrier.

The education and outreach plan includes creating educational modules, training opportunities for workers as well as graduate and undergraduate students—especially those from underrepresented groups, and K12 activities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.