Socializing with robots: Human-robot interactions within a virtual environment

Robots are already physically supporting humans within multiple processes, but as a step further, the robots will be able to identify and adapt to any individual strengths and become the flawless co-workers needed. One of the questions is whether in other fields of social robotics, e.g. in ergonomics, existing knowledge about human teams can be transferred into the design of hybrid teams and the shaping of human-computer interactions. These developments serve the appearance of Industry 4.0, which is directly correlated to the modernization of productions that are directly involved in defining the concept of hybrid human-robot-teams. This is a concept paper that describes the investigation whether the appearance of the robot and its accuracy while fulfilling the task influence the stress level of the human, his cooperation behavior and trust towards the robot, and as an overall result the performance of the cooperative work in a complete virtual environment. The participants will be given a task to accomplish with the aid of their virtual robot partner and rely on their features and abilities, they have to act as efficiently as possible, which gives room to investigate the teamwork over various team development stages, stress, trust, and performance. The study will take place in August 2016, where the results will be published shortly afterwards.