An experimental study of parameters influencing physical Human-Robot negotiation in comanipulative tracking task

The present paper investigates the relationship between human and virtual partners’ behaviors during a comanipulative task requiring negotiation. More precisely, the study is focused on the influence of the Virtual Partner’s (which was designed in a previous study) propensity to take the lead during conflicts over its human partner behavior. The experimental design includes both Human-Human and Human-Robot trials. The Human-Human trials serve as a baseline condition and help assessing the importance of the partner’s nature (human vs robot) knowledge in the subjects behavior. The Human-Robot trials are used to observe the effect of different tuning of the Virtual Partner on the dominance relationship within Human-Robot dyads. The results of the study show that Human behavior is consistent across Human-Human trials, and is not influenced by the knowledge of their partner’s nature. Moreover, a simple tuning of the negotiation thresholds of the Virtual Partner allows to significantly modify the dominance of the human partner, although this modification has no lasting effects.