Attributing responsibility for performance failure on worker-robot trust in construction collaborative tasks

Abstract

Recent advances in construction automation increased the need for cooperation between workers and robots, where workers have to face both success and failure in human-robot collaborative work, ultimately affecting their trust in robots. This study simulated a worker-robot bricklaying collaborative task to examine the impacts of blame targets (responsibility attributions) on trust and trust transfer in multi-robots-human interaction. The findings showed that workers’ responsibility attributions to themselves or robots significantly affect their trust in the robot. Further, in a multi-robots-human interaction, observing one robot’s failure to complete the task will affect the trust in the other devices, aka., trust transfer.