DOI: 10.4018/IJERTCS.2018070106 International Journal of Embedded and Real-Time Communication Systems Volume 9 • Issue 2 • July-December 2018 Copyright © 2018, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. 79 An Advanced Human-Robot Interaction Interface for Collaborative Robotic Assembly Tasks Christos Papadopoulos, CERTH, Thermi, Greece Ioannis Mariolis, CERTH, Thermi, Greece Angeliki Topalidou-Kyniazopoulou, CERTH, Thermi, Greece Grigorios Piperagkas, CERTH, Thermi, Greece Dimosthenis Ioannidis, CERTH, Thermi, Greece Dimitrios Tzovaras, CERTH, Thermi, Greece ABSTRACT This article introduces an advanced human-robot interaction (HRI) interface that allows teaching new assembly tasks to collaborative robotic systems. Using advanced perception and simulation technologies, the interface provides the proper tools for a non-expert user to teach a robot a new assembly task in a short amount of time. An RGBD camera is used to allow the user to demonstrate the task and the system extracts the needed information for the assembly to be simulated and performed by the robot, while the user guides the process. The HRI interface is integrated with the ROS framework and is built as a web application allowing operation through portable devices, such as a tablet PC. The interface is evaluated with user experience rating from test subjects that are requested to teach a folding assembly task to the robot. KEywoRdS HRI Web Interface, Human Robot Interaction, Robot Simulation, Teaching Robotic Assembly INTRodUCTIoN One of the major challenges in the efforts to use robots for complex assembly tasks is reducing the amount of time and resources needed to teach the robots how to perform the assembly in question. In our days, expert roboticists can program new policies and skills within specialized domains such as manufacturing and lab experimentation, but this approach requires large amount of programming time and resources that are not always available (Wilcox, Nikolaidis & Shah, 2012). A potential commonly proposed solution to this problem is Learning from Demonstration (Argall, Chernova, Veloso & Browning, 2009). Using a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) interface, the teacher provides demonstrations of a desired task, which are then used to plan the robot actions that need to be performed in order to successfully complete this task. This paper focuses on the specifics of the functionality of the HRI system which is used for the demonstration of an assembly task from an inexperienced user and the simulation of the assembly task in a virtual environment. Although Learning from Demonstration (LfD) has been already used as a technique to teach a robot new skills (Osentoski et al., 2012), to the best of our knowledge it has