"It Was Not Your Fault" – Emotional Awareness Improves Collaborative Robots

Abstract

We have conducted a user study to investigate the importance of emotional awareness and the underlying affect-driven processes during a human-robot collaboration. The goal of this user study was twofold: (1) Investigating the overall functionality of the mechanisms and the underlying algorithms in our architecture, (2) Evaluating human's willingness and assessment of collaboration with an emotion-aware and an emotion-ignorant robot. We designed a simple table top activity to simulate the collaborative environment in which a participant and the robot were installing a solar panel together. The result of our user study shows that humans' significantly prefer working with an emotion-aware robot during collaboration.