Humanoid Co-workers

Problem

Working alongside humanoid robots and sharing your work with them still seems like an unusual phenomenon. This work explores more about this culture and its further implications.

Goal

We make the humanoid robot Nadine work in an insurance company for a long period of time to see how comfortable the workers felt around it and how did it being present impact their work performance.

Methodology

Surveys

Interviews

Advisor

Prof. Nadia Thalmann

Human-robot interaction in corporate workplaces is a research area which remains unexplored. In this paper, we present the results and analysis of a social experiment we conducted by introducing a humanoid robot (Nadine) into a collaborative social workplace. The humanoid’s primary task was to function as a receptionist and provide general assistance to the customers. Moreover, the employees who interacted with Nadine were given over a month to get used to her capabilities, after which, the feedback was collected from the staff on the grounds of influence on productivity, affect experienced during interaction and their views on social robots assisting with regular tasks. Our results show that the usage of social robots for assisting with normal day-to-day tasks is taken quite positively by the co-workers and that in the near future, more capable humanoid social robots can be used in workplaces for assisting with menial tasks. Finally, we posit that surveys such as ours could result in constructive opinions based on technological awareness, rather than opinions from media-driven fears about the threats of technology.

–> Link to Publication.