The Influence of Demographic Variation on the Perception of Industrial Robot Movements

TL;DR

This study investigates how demographic factors influence perceptions of industrial robot movements, revealing general preferences and slight demographic-based differences, through a comprehensive literature review and a large-scale web experiment.

Contribution

It provides new empirical data on demographic effects on industrial robot movement perception, addressing gaps in prior research mainly focused on social robots.

Findings

Participants prefer side approach, large movement range, and smooth movements.

Most preferences are consistent across demographics.

Gender and age cause minor differences in movement speed preferences.

Abstract

The influence of individual differences on the perception and evaluation of interactions with robots has been researched for decades. Some human demographic characteristics have been shown to affect how individuals perceive interactions with robots. Still, it is to-date not clear whether, which and to what extent individual differences influence how we perceive robots, and even less is known about human factors and their effect on the perception of robot movements. In addition, most results on the relevance of individual differences investigate human-robot interactions with humanoid or social robots whereas interactions with industrial robots are underrepresented. We present a literature review on the relationship of robot movements and the influence of demographic variation. Our review reveals a limited comparability of existing findings due to a lack of standardized robot manipulations, various dependent variables used and differing experimental setups including different robot types. In addition, most studies have insufficient sample sizes to derive generalizable results. To overcome these shortcomings, we report the results from a Web-based experiment with 930 participants that studies the effect of demographic characteristics on the evaluation of movement behaviors of an articulated robot arm. Our findings demonstrate that most participants prefer an approach from the side, a large movement range, conventional numbers of rotations, smooth movements and neither fast nor slow movement speeds. Regarding individual differences, most of these preferences are robust to demographic variation, and only gender and age was found to cause slight preference differences between slow and fast movements.