Human Understanding and Perception of Unanticipated Robot Action in the Context of Physical Interaction

Abstract

Anticipating a future scenario where the robot initiates its own actions and behaves voluntarily when collaborating with humans, our research focuses on human understanding and perception of unanticipated robot actions during physical human-robot interaction. While the current literature searches for key factors that make the human-robot collaboration successful, the question of how people experience the robot’s unanticipated action as cooperative or uncooperative seems to remain open. We designed a game-based experiment (N = 35) where the participant played a “catch-falling-coins” game by moving a robotic arm. Our experiment introduced unanticipated robot actions in an “active session” where the robot targeted higher-valued coins without first informing the participants. Through semi-structured interviews and statistical analysis of questionnaires (Big Five Personality Test, SAM, NARS and CH33), we examined the participants’ understanding of the robot’s “intention” and their positive or negative perception of the robot as cooperative or uncooperative. Among the participants who understood that the robot’s “intention” was to catch the higher-valued coins, the majority of them reported a positive perception of the robot (cooperative or helpful) while this was not the case among those who did not understand the robot’s intention. We also observed relevant relationships between some personality traits and a person’s understanding of the robot’s intention. Qualitative analysis of the interviews allowed us to structure the process of perception change during the game into three phases: confusion, investigation, and adaptation. We believe that our research contributes to the study of human perception, and particularly to the relationship between a human’s understanding of unanticipated robot actions and their positive or negative perception of the robot.