The escape room environment.

Our work got accepted to IVA2019. We explore the effects of robot failure severity (no failure vs. low-impact vs. high-impact) on people's subjective ratings of the robot. We designed an escape room scenario in which one participant teams up with a remotely-controlled Pepper robot. We manipulated the robot's performance at the end of the game: the robot would either correctly follow the participant's instructions (control condition), the robot would fail but people could still complete the task of escaping the room (low-impact condition), or the robot's failure would cause the game to be lost (high-impact condition). Take-away messages from this work:

  • People did not rate the robot differently across conditions in terms of warmth, competence, and discomfort.

  • People in the low-impact condition had significantly less faith in the robot’s robustness in future escape room scenarios.

  • Qualitative analysis suggests that people may view task performance as a team effort and may blame their team or themselves more for the robot failure in case of a high-impact failure as compared to the low-impact failure.

@inproceedings{van2019take, title={Take One For the Team: The Effects of Error Severity in Collaborative Tasks with Social Robots}, author={Van Waveren, Sanne and Carter, Elizabeth J and Leite, Iolanda}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents}, pages={151--158}, year={2019}, organization={ACM} }

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