The Effect of Robot Decision Making on Human Perception of a Robot in a Collaborative Task - A Remote Study

Abstract

The use of collaborative robots is becoming more widespread across industries. This makes it essential to study robot planning in order to work effectively and smoothly with human teammates while maintaining a positive human perception of the robots. This paper evaluates the influence of a robot’s strategy and decision making on the participants’ perception of the robot. We designed an online experiment where a robot and participants need to collaborate and organize a set of objects. We studied three different strategies where the robot either prioritizes the human’s objective, its own objective, or uses a balanced strategy. We then analyze and report the results based on participants’ answers to questionnaires before and after the experiment, their comments, and their actions during the experiment. The results show that strategies prioritizing the human’s objective, or balancing between the robot’s and the human’s objectives can effectively improve participants’ perception of the robot and create a collaborative environment.