Awareness of others actions strengthens the teamwork between individuals. With this experiment, we aim to study the impact that the presence of awareness in a robotic arm has in a collaborative task between a robot and humans. Based on the fact that awareness is crucial to bolster teamwork between people, the primary hypothesis is that the robot's awareness will also improve human's perception of teamwork.
The experiment consists in a collaborative task between one robotic arm and two people, strangers between them, in which they need to build a tower with blocks. For the study, there are two conditions, one in which the robot shows awareness, performing gaze actions depending on the participants behaviors, gazing at them when it's their turn to act and at the tower when they're performing their action, and the other in which the robot lacks awareness, simply looking at a fixed point when not on its turn. To read their behaviors, a static external camera will be used. The experiment will follow a between-subjects design with the sequence of the conditions being pseudo-random, being randomly chosen for each pair of participants, but in a way that, in the end, both sequences are chosen the same amount of times.
Before starting and seeing the place where the experiment will take place, both participants will be quickly debriefed on what they need to do, build a tower with a pre-configured design while respecting their turn order. After starting, the communication with the participants will be limited. The experiment will be realized in a round table with the robotic arm (Kinova Gen3). The two participants will position themselves in a way that the distance between them and the robot is the same. The camera will be in a place that ensures that both participants are in sight, on opposite sides. On top of the table there will be nine blocks, colored with three different colors (three blocks of each color) with each being associated with the robot and the participants. The turn order is decided by the tower's design. After the tower is finished, the blocks will be reset back to their starting positions (it's important that the blocks assigned to the robot are always in the same starting position) and the experiment will proceed to the next configuration, with there being a total of four configurations (two for each condition).
After finishing each condition, all participants will respond to a questionnaire about how the awareness of the robot (or the lack of it) affected their experience.