People’s Perceptions of Task Criticality and Preferences for Robot Autonomy

Abstract

The concept of criticality is relatively new to the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community. Now that robots are becoming more routinely available to the public, it is important to understand what makes a task critical, and how this is linked to people’s preferences for different levels of autonomy for domestic robot companions. To do so, we first conducted a live study to see how much autonomy people would give to a robot to perform a simple task. We then conducted a questionnaire study to investigate how people classify task criticality, which builds up to our future study that will explore how task criticality affects the way people want to have control their robot - performing the task.