View Proposal

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Proposer

Marta Romeo

Title

The role of expectations in the face of robots’ failures

Goal

Description

Adoption of robotics solution is still a challenging problem. This is driven by the fact that the general public is exposed to robots and their applications mainly through the media, that often times exaggerate the capabilities of the platforms. This is even more true with social robots, that are expected to be our companions and everyday helpers. What happens when robots fail? Most of the users get discouraged and dismiss the technology. This project will look at how the perceived gravity of the robot failure changes with respect to the level of knowledge about the robot’s capabilities. This will be tested with a user study. Within the project you will have to: 1) define the different levels of information to give to participants before the study begins; 2) develop a task for a social robot (platform to be decided as a part of the study design) to complete together with the participants; 2) program the robot to fail within the task 3) collect and analyse the data on participants perception of the robot following the interaction.

Resources

[1] A. M. Aroyo, D. Pasquali, et al. (2021). Expectations Vs. Reality: Unreliability and Transparency in a Treasure Hunt Game With Icub. in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 5681-5688, July 2021. [2] Mirnig, N., Stollnberger, G., et al. (2017). To Err Is Robot: How Humans Assess and Act toward an Erroneous Social Robot. Frontiers Robotics AI, 4, 21.

Background

Python programming, statistics for data analysis, ROS (desirable)

Url

Difficulty Level

Variable

Ethical Approval

Full

Number Of Students

0

Supervisor

Marta Romeo

Keywords

Degrees

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems
Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence
Master of Science in Human Robot Interaction
Master of Science in Robotics