Impact of Collaborative Robots on Human Trust, Anxiety, and Workload: Experiment Findings

This work proposes an experiment setup and its protocols to investigate the impact of cobot’s size, speed and collaboration modes on different human factors including trust, propensity to trust, anxiety, and mental workload. The setup and the protocols supported the execution of different experiments where the 29 participants were asked to complete the Tower of Hanoi in collaboration with a cobot. The setup and the protocols provide a ready-to-use solution to expand experiments for further studies. Moreover, statistical analysis of the results shows higher cobot speeds increased trust propensity despite not significantly affecting overall trust or anxiety. Collaboration modes significantly influenced perceived workload and task performance, with the “Collaboration with Trigger” mode resulting in lower mental workload but longer task completion times. No significant differences were found in human factors concerning cobot size, indicating that variations in size do not significantly impact trust, propensity to trust, anxiety, or workload. Additionally, the collaboration mode with cobots notably affects workload perception and task performance, with specific modes reducing perceived effort but not necessarily improving task efficiency.