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In Control or under Control? Human-Robot Collaboration in Warehouse Order Picking

Warehouse operations are rapidly becoming more robotized to increase performance and cut costs. One important new way of working is in collaboration between humans and robots. However, even though humans and their behavior remain essential for operational performance, human factors in human-robot collaboration are still underrepresented in Operations Management literature. To contribute to the scarce knowledge in this domain, we conducted a unique real-effort experiment in a warehouse especially erected for this study. In this experiment we compare the objective outcomes of collaborative productivity, collaborative accuracy, and human pick speed between a scenario with the human leading the robot and a scenario with the human following the robot. Furthermore, we investigate the behavioral mechanism that governs the reaction of humans to the novel collaboration with robots. We find that human leading allows for superior collaborative order picking productivity compared to human following. In contrast, human following allows for greater collaborative order picking accuracy compared to human leading. We additionally establish prevention regulatory focus as the behavioral mechanism through which workers may accelerate their pick speed to bridge the productivity gap between the setups. Finally, we confirm that competence in manual order picking is directly transferable to the human-robot collaborative environment.