Robots Mediating Interaction – an update

Since our our previous blog we have applied for research ethics to carry out an experiment to explore a fully autonomous cobot supervised by humans, versus a fully manually controlled cobot.  The experiment will work in two different test conditions which will be set up at the Cobot Maker Space and research participants will be unaware which condition they are assigned to.

After the experiment, participants will be interviewed about their perceptions of the cobot – its similarity to being human, how it worked in the team, what it contributed and how it conducted tasks.  This phase of work will end with a focus group, during which participants will be invited to discuss what test condition they were in and give their views about the humanness of the cobots actions during the experiment.