Women and Men Collaborating with Robots on Assembly Lines

Abstract

This paper presents an original scenario design specifically created for exploring gender-related issues surrounding collaborative human-robot teams on assembly lines. Our methodology is grounded squarely in the need for increased gender work in human-robot interaction. As with most research in social human-robot interaction, investigating and exploring gender issues relies heavily on an evaluation methodology and scenario that aims to maximize ecological validity, so that the lab results can generalize to a real-world social scenario. In this paper, we present our discussion on study elements required for ecological validity in our context, present an original study design that meets these criteria, and present initial pilot results that reflect on our approach and study design.