To collaborate or not to collaborate: understanding human-robot collaboration

In the last years, collaborative robots have been experiencing a continuous dramatic diffusion. Notwithstanding, they are often used in human-robot collaboration scenarios that do not fully leverage humans and robots capabilities. This paper aims to investigate how human individuals perceive collaboration with robots, comparing it to collaboration with another human agent. To this end, we design a collaborative task in the form of a joint motor action, where the human agent shares actions in a dyadic interaction with a robot or a human confederate. Our aim is to assess quality of the task and perceived pleasantness or discomfort in the two collaborative situations. The achieved results show that differences exist when participants collaborate with another human agent or a robot. Specifically, when working with the robot, on average the task was carried out more cautiously, and less errors were made, thus leading to the assumption that participants were aware that the robot is a non-intentional agent. They acted faster and made more errors in the human-robot condition. Moreover, they reported that collaborating with the human federate was more pleasant, although more competitive. Ultimately, the study paves the way to understanding human attitude towards the collaboration with robots and shaping human-robot collaboration around it.