Useful and Motivating Robots — The Influence of Task Structure on Human-Robot Teamwork

Robots have recently started to leave their safety cages to be used in close vicinity to humans. This also causes changes in the nature of the tasks that robots and humans solve together, i.e., in the degree of structure of the tasks. While traditional, industrial tasks were highly structured, the new tasks often have a low level of structure. We present a user study that compares a highly and a little structured task in a text-based computer game played by human-robot teams. The results suggest that users do not only find robots useful and motivating in highly structured tasks where they depend on their help, but also in little structured tasks that they could solve on their own.