Perception of Human-Robot Collaboration Across Countries and Job Domains

Abstract

Understanding perceptions of blue-collar workers on safety, autonomy, and job security in collaborative human-robot environments is vital to ensure that fear and job displacement is minimized in the future. Perception and fear of robots is driven by culture, country, education level, position in the labor market, and minority status. Recent studies suggest that workers may develop positive views if robots are used to perform less desirable tasks, improve skills, and facilitate workplace safety. In this paper, we conduct a survey of worker perceptions towards robots of varying collaborative capabilitiesfully interventional or always assistive, fully standoff or never directly assistive, and assistive on an as-needed basis. We administer a questionnaire-based survey to blue-collar workers in 4 different countries, United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia working in construction, contract work, manufacturing, retail, transportation and delivery, and warehousing. We received 530 successful responses in total from workers in all 4 countries and 6 job domains. To better understand whether perceptions of collaborative robots and human co-workers are universal or job and country-based, we break down our analysis based on the respondent reported job domain and country. We find perceptions of co-workers and robots to be job domain and country dependent, necessitating the need to develop robotic assistants with job domain and cultural awareness.