Persona-Based Process Design for Assistive Human-Robot Workplaces for Persons with Disabilities

2026-04-29

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited generalizability and scalability of existing assistive human–robot collaboration systems, which often rely on highly individualized designs and face high implementation barriers for universal design principles. To overcome these challenges, this work proposes an adaptive collaboration framework that integrates user personas derived from representative disability categories with universal design principles. By applying design thinking to decompose task actions and employing behavior trees to dynamically modulate the robot’s level of assistance, the framework enables online adaptation to diverse disability needs. This approach represents the first systematic integration of user personas and universal design in assistive robotics. Evaluated on a cardboard-folding task, the method demonstrated effectiveness across seven disability personas, generating adaptive strategies that are both comprehensive and aligned with universal design principles.

Abstract

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.

Problem

• human-robot interaction
• universal design
• assistive workplaces
• persons with disabilities
• process design

Innovation

• persona-based design
• human-robot collaboration
• universal design
• behavior tree
• adaptive workplace