Bot App\'etit! Exploring how Robot Morphology Shapes Perceived Affordances via a Mise en Place Scenario in a VR Kitchen

TL;DR

This paper investigates how robot visual design, especially morphology, influences human perceptions and interactions in a collaborative VR kitchen task, highlighting design factors that affect task delegation and collaboration.

Contribution

It introduces a VR-based methodology to study how robot morphology impacts human perceptions and behaviors in collaborative tasks, proposing hypotheses for future validation.

Findings

Humans prefer to collaborate with biomorphic robots

Beliefs about robot sensory capabilities are less affected by morphology

Fewer avoidance strategies are used with gracile robots

Abstract

This study explores which factors of the visual design of a robot may influence how humans would place it in a collaborative cooking scenario and how these features may influence task delegation. Human participants were placed in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment and asked to set up a kitchen for cooking alongside a robot companion while considering the robot's morphology. We collected multimodal data for the arrangements created by the participants, transcripts of their think-aloud as they were performing the task, and transcripts of their answers to structured post-task questionnaires. Based on analyzing this data, we formulate several hypotheses: humans prefer to collaborate with biomorphic robots; human beliefs about the sensory capabilities of robots are less influenced by the morphology of the robot than beliefs about action capabilities; and humans will implement fewer avoidance strategies when sharing space with gracile robots. We intend to verify these hypotheses in follow-up studies.