Designing an Experiment for Generating Human Experiences of Robot Cooperativeness and Uncooperativeness

Abstract

While existing approaches to human-robot collaboration typically focus on how to build robots that can work safely and fluently with humans on collaborative tasks, our research focuses on how people experience interaction with a robot and interpret its behaviour as collaborative or non-collaborative. By applying a microsociological theory to analyse the process of interaction as it unfolds, our project aims to identify the boundary between cooperativeness and uncooperativeness of the robot in the shared task of a human and a robot carrying an object to a destination. The paper presents the experimental protocol designed based on the microsociological theory that is less known in current human-robot interaction studies. The aim of the experiment is to enable participants to experience expected and unexpected interactions with a robot and to account for how the interaction affects participant interpretation of robot cooperativeness and uncooperativeness.