Analysis of reactions towards failures and recovery strategies for autonomous robots

Human-robot interaction involving the failure of autonomous robots is not yet well understood. We conducted two online surveys with a total of 1200 participants in which people assessed situations where an autonomous robot experienced different kinds of failure. This information was used to construct a measurement scale of people's reaction to failure where positive values correspond with increasingly positive reactions and negative values with negative reactions. We then used this scale to compare different kinds of failure situations, including the severity of the failures, the context risk involved, and the effectiveness of different kinds of recovery strategies. We found evidence that the effectiveness of recovery strategies depends on the task, context, and severity of failure.

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