Take One For the Team: The Effects of Error Severity in Collaborative Tasks with Social Robots

We explore the effects of robot failure severity (no failure vs. low-impact vs. high-impact) on people's subjective ratings of the robot. We designed an escape room scenario in which one participant teams up with a remotely-controlled Pepper robot. We manipulated the robot's performance at the end of the game: the robot would either correctly follow the participant's instructions (control condition), the robot would fail but people could still complete the task of escaping the room (low-impact condition), or the robot's failure would cause the game to be lost (high-impact condition). Results showed no difference across conditions for people's ratings of the robot in terms of warmth, competence, and discomfort. However, people in the low-impact condition had significantly less faith in the robot's robustness in future escape room scenarios. Open-ended questions revealed interesting trends that are worth pursuing in the future: people may view task performance as a team effort and may blame their team or themselves more for the robot failure in case of a high-impact failure as compared to the low-impact failure.