More than just co-workers: Presence of humanoid robot co-worker influences human performance

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 13; no. 11; p. e0206698
• Main Authors: Vasalya, Ashesh, Ganesh, Gowrishankar, Kheddar, Abderrahmane
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 01.11.2018; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adult; Arm; Behavior; Behavior Observation Techniques - statistics & numerical data; Biology and Life Sciences; Collaboration; Computer Science; Earth Sciences; Engineering and Technology; Experiments; Female; Head movement; Human behavior; Human motion; Human performance; Humanoid; Humans; International conferences; Laboratories; Male; Medicine and Health Sciences; Movement - physiology; Neurosciences; Physical Sciences; Research and Analysis Methods; Robotics; Robotics - instrumentation; Robotics - statistics & numerical data; Robots; Social Sciences; Torso; Work Performance - statistics & numerical data; Workers; Young Adult; France; Japan
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206698
• ISSN: 1932-6203

Does the presence of a robot co-worker influence the performance of humans around it? Studies of motor contagions during human-robot interactions have examined either how the observation of a robot affects a human's movement velocity, or how it affects the human's movement variance, but never both together. Performance however, has to be measured considering both task speed (or frequency) as well as task accuracy. Here we examine an empirical repetitive industrial task in which a human participant and a humanoid robot work near each other. We systematically varied the robot behavior, and observed whether and how the performance of a human participant is affected by the presence of the robot. To investigate the effect of physical form, we added conditions where the robot co-worker torso and head were covered, and only the moving arm was visible to the human participants. Finally, we compared these behaviors with a human co-worker, and examined how the observed behavioral affects scale with experience of robots. Our results show that human task frequency, but not task accuracy, is affected by the observation of a humanoid robot co-worker, provided the robot's head and torso are visible.