Impact of Different Failures on a Robot's Perceived Reliability

TL;DR

This study investigates how different robot failures impact perceived reliability and trust, showing that some failures are less damaging and that success can restore trust without explicit repair actions.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into how various failure types affect perceived reliability and demonstrates that success can recover trust even after failures.

Findings

Mistakes are less damaging to perceived reliability than slips or lapses.

Success following a failure restores perceived reliability to the same level as continuous success.

Participants' trust was influenced by failure type and subsequent success, highlighting the importance of recovery in human-robot interaction.

Abstract

Robots fail, potentially leading to a loss in the robot's perceived reliability (PR), a measure correlated with trustworthiness. In this study we examine how various kinds of failures affect the PR of the robot differently, and how this measure recovers without explicit social repair actions by the robot. In a preregistered and controlled online video study, participants were asked to predict a robot's success in a pick-and-place task. We examined manipulation failures (slips), freezing (lapses), and three types of incorrect picked objects or place goals (mistakes). Participants were shown one of 11 videos -- one of five types of failure, one of five types of failure followed by a successful execution in the same video, or a successful execution video. This was followed by two additional successful execution videos. Participants bet money either on the robot or on a coin toss after each video. People's betting patterns along with a qualitative analysis of their survey responses highlight that mistakes are less damaging to PR than slips or lapses, and some mistakes are even perceived as successes. We also see that successes immediately following a failure have the same effect on PR as successes without a preceding failure. Finally, we show that successful executions recover PR after a failure. Our findings highlight which robot failures are in higher need of repair in a human-robot interaction, and how trust could be recovered by robot successes.