Aligning human psychomotor characteristics with robots, exoskeletons and augmented reality

•The uncertainty of human behaviour can lead to productivity, quality, and safety problems.•Fundamental reasons for the uncertainty of human behaviour are explained through a model of psychomotor characteristics.•The model encompasses physiology, past experiences, personality, gender, culture, emotion, reasoning, and biocybernetics.•The model provides guidelines for planning production work that includes robots, exoskeletons, and augmented reality.•Reference is made to 10 action research cases focused on improving machine tending, palletizing, grinding and inspection