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Team member inclusion is vital in collaborative teams. In this work, we explore two strategies to increase the inclusion of human team members in a human-robot team: 1) giving a person in the group a specialized role (the 'robot liaison') and 2) having the robot verbally support human team members. In a human subjects experiment (N = 26 teams, 78 participants), groups of three participants completed two rounds of a collaborative task. In round one, two participants (ingroup) completed a task with a robot in one room, and one participant (outgroup) completed the same task with a robot in a different room. In round two, all three participants and one robot completed a second task in the same room, where one participant was designated as the robot liaison. During round two, the robot verbally supported each participant 6 times on average. Results show that participants with the robot liaison role had a lower perceived group inclusion than the other group members. Additionally, when outgroup members were the robot liaison, the group was less likely to incorporate their ideas into the group's final decision. In response to the robot's supportive utterances, outgroup members, and not ingroup members, showed an increase in the proportion of time they spent talking to the group. Our results suggest that specialized roles may hinder human team member inclusion, whereas supportive robot utterances show promise in encouraging contributions from individuals who feel excluded.
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Animated Surfaces for Novel Robot-Rooms
We discuss novel human-centered intelligent spaces, specifically robotic elements which form the core of an interactive room that physically reconfigures: a robot-room. The proposed robot-room represents an advance in human-centered computing whereby human interaction is within a machine that physically envelops us. We discuss the motivation for such robot-rooms, and present initial work aimed at their physical realization.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2221125
- PAR ID:
- 10528518
- Publisher / Repository:
- https://sites.google.com/view/hfr2023/home
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Robot-Rooms, Robotic, Surfaces.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- The 16th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR 2023), Munich, Germany, September 2023..
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
