Investigating human perceptions of robot capabilities in remote human-robot team tasks based on first-person robot video feeds

Abstract

It is well-known that a robot's appearance and its observable behavior can affect a human interactant's perceptions of the robot's capabilities and propensities in settings where humans and robots are co-located; for remote interactions the specific effects are less clear. Here, we use a remote interaction setting to investigate possible effects of simulated versus real first-person robot video feeds. The first experiment uses subject-level comparisons of the two video conditions in a multi-robot setting while the second and third experiments focus on a single robot, single video condition using a larger population (via Amazon Mechanical Turk) to study between-subjects effects. The latter experiments also probe the effects of robot appearance, video feed type, and stake humans have in the task. We observe a complex interplay between interaction, robot appearance, and video feed type as they affect perceived collaboration, utility, competence, and warmth of the robot.