Effects of Social Factors and Team Dynamics on Adoption of Collaborative Robot Autonomy

As automation becomes more prevalent, the fear of job loss due to automation increases [22]. Workers may not be amenable to working with a robotic co-worker due to a negative perception of the technology. The attitudes of workers towards automation are influenced by a variety of complex and multi-faceted factors such as intention to use, perceived usefulness and other external variables [15]. In an analog manufacturing environment, we explore how these various factors influence an individual's willingness to work with a robot over a human co-worker in a collaborative Lego building task. We specifically explore how this willingness is affected by: 1) the level of social rapport established between the individual and his or her human co-worker, 2) the anthropomorphic qualities of the robot, and 3) factors including trust, fluency and personality traits. Our results show that a participant's willingness to work with automation decreased due to lower perceived team fluency (p=0.045), rapport established between a participant and their co-worker (p=0.003), the gender of the participant being male (p=0.041), and a higher inherent trust in people (p=0.018).