A Microsociological Approach to Understanding the Boundary Between Robot Cooperativeness and Uncooperativeness in Human-Robot Collaboration

While existing approaches to human-robot collaboration typically focus on how to build robots that can work safely and fluently with humans on collaborative tasks, our research focuses on how people experience interaction with a robot and interpret its behaviour as cooperative or uncooperative. A microsociological theory was used to analyse the process of interaction as it unfolds, aiming to examine human perception of the cooperativeness and uncooperativeness of a robot and identify the boundary between them in the context of human-robot collaboration. Our hypothesis was that an unexpected robot movement during human-robot interaction will cause a negative perception of uncooperativeness. An experiment where the interaction was ‘disrupted’ by the robot’s movement during a collaborative task was conducted with 21 participants. Our findings, obtained through qualitative analysis based on semi-structured interviews and observations, show that the disruption leads certainly to a negative perception of the robot. The perception of robot cooperativeness or uncooperativeness, however, includes complex processes, and its boundary is not rigid, but flexible and nuanced.