Abstract
Does the presence of a robot co-worker influence the performance of humans around it? Studies of motor contagions during human-robot interactions have examined either how the observation of a robot affects a human’s movement velocity, or how it affects the human’s movement variance, but never both together. Performance however, has to be measured considering both task speed (or frequency) as well as task accuracy. Here we examine an empirical repetitive industrial task in which a human participant and a humanoid robot work near each other. We systematically varied the robot behavior, and observed whether and how the performance of a human participant is affected by the presence of the robot. To investigate the effect of physical form, we added conditions where the robot co-worker torso and head were covered, and only the moving arm was visible to the human participants. Finally, we compared these behaviors with a human co-worker, and examined how the observed behavioral affects scale with experience of robots. Our results show that human task frequency, but not task accuracy, is affected by the observation of a humanoid robot co-worker, provided the robot’s head and torso are visible.
Highlights
Robotics is increasingly shifting to service and application fields, where robots need to collaborate with, and work in close proximity to, human co-workers
Participants were well instructed and informed with the experiment and task procedure, they were naïve to the motives of the experiments to avoid bias in the results as we are interested in the implicit effect of motor contagion
We observed that the performance frequencies of human participants were influenced by the presence of a humanoid robot co-worker
Summary
Robotics is increasingly shifting to service and application fields, where robots need to collaborate with, and work in close proximity to, human co-workers. In these scenarios, it is of prime importance to understand how the presence of a robot co-worker influences the performance of humans around them. Observation of actions performed by others is known to induce implicit effects on an individual’s action These effects, that are referred to as motor contagions, have been extensively studied in psychology and sports science [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Studies of motor contagions during human-robot interactions [11] are sparse, and have examined either how the observation of robots affect a human’s movement velocity [12,13,14,15], or how it affects a human’s
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