Attitudes Towards Human-Robot Collaboration and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

It is expected that human-robot collaboration will increase in the future. Some people are already experiencing this in their working life, but other people are still skeptical about it. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new challenges to the world’s population and has a strong impact on our everyday working life. The question arises, whether the perceived involvement in the current situation as well as the occupational field influence the attitudes towards human-robot collaboration. Overall, 54 men, 45 women and 1 non-binary (N = 100) aged between 18 and 71 years (M = 29.87, SD = 14.00) participated in an exploratory online study. The results of the study show that the participants’ attitudes towards the use of collaborative robots in the three different categories assembly, logistics and cleaning were rather positive. Furthermore, assembly and logistics tasks were assessed as significant more conceivable for human-robot collaboration than cleaning tasks. Interestingly, participants that were more concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic assessed the use of collaborative robots overall significant more positive than other participants did. Attitude differences due to the different occupational fields of the participants did not reach the level of significance. In addition, the participants described different functions in which they could imagine collaborative robots in the three categories assembly, logistics and cleaning. The results of the presented exploratory study shall help to get more insight in this important future field.