Technology with Embodied Physical Actions: Understanding Interactions and Effectiveness Gains in Teams Working with Robots

Abstract

Teams in different areas are increasingly adopting robots to perform various mission operations. The inclusion of robots in teams has drawn consistent attention from scholars in relevant fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI). Yet, the current literature has not fully addressed issues regarding teamwork by mainly focusing on the collaboration between a single robot and an individual. The limited scope of human-robot collaboration in the existing research hinders uncovering the mechanism of performance gains in teams that involve multiple robots and people. This dissertation research is an effort to address the issue by achieving two goals. First, this dissertation examines the impacts of interaction between human teammates alone and interaction between humans and robots on outcomes in teams working with robots. Second, I provide insight into the development of teams working with robots by examining ways to promote a team member’s intention to work with robots. In this dissertation, I conducted three studies in an endeavor to accomplish the aforementioned goals. The first study, in Chapter 2, turns to theory trust in teams to explain outcome gains in teams working with robots. This study reports result from a lab experiment, in which two people fulfilled a collaborative task using two robots. The results show that trust in robots and trust in teammates can be enhanced by a robot-building activity and team identification, respectively. The enhanced trust revealed unique impacts on different team outcomes: trust in robots increased only team performance while trust in teammates increased only satisfaction. Theoretical and practical contributions of the findings are discussed in the chapter. The second study, in Chapter 3, uncovers how team member’s efficacy beliefs interplay with team diversity to promote performance in teams working with robots. Results from a lab experiment reveal that individual operator’s performance is enhanced by team potency perception only when the team is ethnically diverse. This study contributes to theory by identifying team diversity as a limiting condition of performance gains for robot operators in teams. The third study, in Chapter 4, focuses on factors leading to the development of teams working with robots. I conducted an online experiment to examine how surface-level and deep-level similarity contribute to trust in a robotic partner and the impact of the trust on a team member’s intention to work with the robot in varying degrees of danger. This study generally shows that the possibility of danger regulates not only the positive link between the surface-level similarity and trust in robot and but also the link between intention to work with the robot and intention to replace a human teammate with the robot. Chapter 5, as a concluding chapter of this dissertation, discusses the theoretical and practical implications drawn from the three studies.