ABSTRACT
Advances in artificial intelligence and speech recognition, less expensive yet more sophisticated mobile computing hardware, and even such mundane changes as increasing ubiquity of ramps in public buildings have combined to make professional service robots-robots that assist workers-more practical than ever before. Autonomous mobile robots made with current technology can identify and track people and objects, understand and respond to spoken questions, and travel to a destination while avoiding obstacles (see Fong, Nourbakhsh, & Dautenhahn, 2002). Robots can be built to have abilities that complement human abilities. They can go to places that are toxic or unsafe and can tolerate repetitive, mundane tasks. They can have large databases of knowledge and can connect through networks to vast sources of additional data.With these ongoing advances, the use of robots in the workplace is likely to grow substantially. The workplace in the near future will increasingly contain robots and people working together, each using their own stronger skills, and each relying on the other for parts of the tasks where the other has the better skills. In a recent report (United Nations, 2002; see also Thrun, 2004), the United Nations indicated that the use of these professional service robots will grow substantially in the next few years in fields as diverse as the military, medical services, and agriculture. Autonomous robots, for example, are expected to work in tandem with military personnel so that soldiers can better understand the dangers of the battlefield; robots also will supply troops with ammunition and provide surveillance (Squeo, 2001) and assist astronauts in investigating distant planets (Ambrose, Askew, Bluethmann, & Diftler, 2001). Already, robots perform the mundane chore of delivering medications from pharmacies to nursing stations in hospitals, using their intelligence to avoid obstacles as they travel (Okie, 2002; Siino & Hinds, 2004); people, however, are required for loading and unloading the medications, and for programming the robot’s destination. Sheridan (1992) described an “optimistic scenario” in which robots will
grow in number and variety, becoming available to us to do our beck and call in our homes, schools, and government facilities, in our vehicles, our hospitals, and across the en tire spectrum of our workplaces-factories, farms, offices, construction sites, mines, and so on. (p. 336) In many instances, these robots will share the same physical space with people and work closely with people to accomplish joint tasks as part of their day-to-day work.Professional service robots, this newer class of robots, are specifically designed to assist workers in accomplishing their goals (see Thrun, 2004). These robots differ from industrial robots and many other technologies found in the work environment (e.g., appliances, computers, navigation systems, etc.) because they are mobile, they do things without being commanded, and they are interactive. These differences suggest that professional service robots may affect the work environment in socially important ways. Because of their ability to move with apparent intentionality in physical space, they are likely to be perceived as animate, triggering social responses (for a review, see Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000). Their ability to travel between different departments also may allow the unplanned movement of information between distant coworkers.If professional service robots are to share the workplace with people, we need to understand what the interaction between them is likely to be like. Will people trust robots to perform operations that the robots are capable of, without oversight? If things go wrong, will people take appropriate responsibility to correct the problem, or will they abdicate responsibility to the robot? In the face of uncertainty, will people ask for and accept the guidance of expert robots? What aspects of the design of the robot will affect the way people and robots work together? The better we understand these questions, the better we can design robots to be effective work partners.For the study we report here, we conducted a laboratory experiment designed to look at the effects of the robot’s appearance and the relative status of the robot on how people work with robots. We also compare human-robot interaction with human-human interaction to better understand how interacting with robotic partners may alter the current work environment. We studied the effects of robot appearance because roboticists are currently making at least de facto decisions about appearance without the benefit of information on the ramifications and perhaps with misconceptions of their effects. We chose relative status as a second dimension because it also can be relatively easily manipulated when introducing a robot into a team, and because status can have a powerful effect on relationships between coworkers. Although these are only two of many possible considerations for the design and implementa
