Methods For Facilitating Long-Term Acceptance of a Robot


Scenarios that call for lt-HRI, such as home health care and cooperative work environments, have interesting social dynamics, even before robots are introduced. The success of human-only teams can be limited by the trust and willingness to collaborate within the team, consideration is worthy of factors that may affect adoption of robots in long-term settings. A coworker who is unwilling to collaborate and trust the abilities of their fellow teammate may refuse to include that teammate in many job related tasks due to territorial behaviors. Exclusion of a robotic team member might eventually lead to a lack of productivity in lt-HRI. Behavior toward a robot companion may be governed, in part, by pre-conceived notions about robots. However, prior work has shown that simple team-building exercises can positively affect attitudes toward a robot, even if the robot under-performs at a task. This objective will address these issues by adapting and evaluating facilitation strategies that have been successful in encouraging the adoption of new technology or improving team cohesion. We will study how these facilitation techniques can bolster human-robot cooperation.

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Publications

  • Poston, J., Lucas, H., Carlson, Z., & Feil-Seifer, D. Does the Safety Demand Characteristic Influence Human-Robot Interaction?. In International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), volume 9979, page 850-859, Springer International Publication. Nov 2016. Springer International Publication. ( details ) ( .pdf )

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