Ergonomic assessment for human-robot collaboration in construction: A VR-real comparative study.

INTRODUCTION: Ensuring occupational safety and health (OSH) for workers is a paramount concern in human-robot collaboration (HRC) within the construction industry. It is essential to effectively identify and mitigate hazardous working conditions by conducting a comprehensive ergonomic assessment of HRC systems prior to real-world implementation. While virtual reality (VR) offers an immersive platform for simulating HRC scenarios, its applications for ergonomic evaluation remain inadequate, primarily due to potential discrepancies between virtual and actual work environments (e.g., visual fidelity and risk perception biases). METHOD: To address this gap, the present study conducts a comparative assessment of multiple dimensions of HRC systems, focusing on work efficiency, collision occurrences, and physical and cognitive ergonomic risks in both VR and real-world settings. RESULTS: The findings indicate that task completion times were notably shorter, by approximately 14% in VR, while a slightly higher number of collisions was observed in the virtual environment. No significant differences were identified in physical and cognitive ergonomic measures between the virtual and real settings. These results support that VR can serve as a viable tool for early-stage ergonomic assessment in HRC, though task performance differences warrant cautious interpretation. CONCLUSIONS AND PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: This study advances construction OSH by providing empirical evidence of VR's potential to support ergonomic design for HRC, paving the way for safer robot integration onsite.