Impact of Robot Actions on Social Signals and Reaction Times in HRI Error Situations

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Human-robot interaction experiments featuring error situations are often excluded from analysis. We argue that a lot of value lies hidden in this discarded data. We analyzed a corpus of 201 videos that show error situations in human-robot interaction experiments. The aim of our analysis was to research (a) if and which social signals the experiment participants show in reaction to error situations, (b) how long it takes the participants to react in the error situations, and (c) whether different robot actions elicit different social signals. We found that participants showed social signals in 49.3% of error situations, more during social norm violations and less during technical failures. Task-related actions by the robot elicited less social signals by the participants, while participants showed more social signals when the robot did not react. Finally, the participants had an overall reaction time of 1.64 seconds before they showed a social signal in response to a robot action. The reaction times are specifically long (4.39 seconds) during task-related actions that go wrong during execution.