Forging Productive Human-Robot Partnerships Through Task Training

Productive human-robot partnerships are vital to successful integration of assistive robots into everyday life. While prior research has explored techniques to facilitate collaboration during human-robot interaction, the work described here aims to forge productive partnerships prior to human-robot interaction, drawing upon team building activities’ aid in establishing effective human teams. Through a 2 (group membership: ingroup and outgroup) × 3 (robot error: main task errors, side task errors, and no errors) online study (N = 62), we demonstrate that 1) a non-social pre-task exercise can help form ingroup relationships; 2) an ingroup robot is perceived as a better, more committed teammate than an outgroup robot (despite the two behaving identically); and 3) participants are more tolerant of negative outcomes when working with an ingroup robot. We discuss how pre-task exercises may serve as an active task failure mitigation strategy.