Cymek Dietlind Helene, Truckenbrodt Anna, Onnasch Linda
Institute of Psychology and Ergonomics, Chair of Psychology of Action and Automation, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Front Robot AI. 2023 Oct 18;10:1249252. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2023.1249252. eCollection 2023.
Thanks to technological advances, robots are now being used for a wide range of tasks in the workplace. They are often introduced as team partners to assist workers. This teaming is typically associated with positive effects on work performance and outcomes. However, little is known about whether typical performance-reducing effects that occur in human teams also occur in human-robot teams. For example, it is not clear whether social loafing, defined as reduced individual effort on a task performed in a team compared to a task performed alone, can also occur in human-robot teams. We investigated this question in an experimental study in which participants worked on an industrial defect inspection task that required them to search for manufacturing defects on circuit boards. One group of participants worked on the task alone, while the other group worked with a robot team partner, receiving boards that had already been inspected by the robot. The robot was quite reliable and marked defects on the boards before handing them over to the human. However, it missed 5 defects. The dependent behavioural measures of interest were effort, operationalised as inspection time and area inspected on the board, and defect detection performance. In addition, subjects rated their subjective effort, performance, and perceived responsibility for the task. Participants in both groups inspected almost the entire board surface, took their time searching, and rated their subjective effort as high. However, participants working in a team with the robot found on average 3.3 defects. People working alone found significantly more defects on these 5 occasions-an average of 4.2. This suggests that participants may have searched the boards less attentively when working with a robot team partner. The participants in our study seemed to have maintained the motor effort to search the boards, but it appears that the search was carried out with less mental effort and less attention to the information being sampled. Changes in mental effort are much harder to measure, but need to be minimised to ensure good performance.
得益于技术进步，机器人如今在工作场所被用于广泛的任务。它们常常作为团队伙伴被引入以协助工人。这种协作通常与对工作绩效和成果的积极影响相关联。然而，对于人类团队中出现的典型的绩效降低效应是否也会在人机团队中出现，我们却知之甚少。例如，尚不清楚社会惰化（定义为与独自执行任务相比，在团队执行任务时个体努力的减少）是否也会在人机团队中发生。我们在一项实验研究中调查了这个问题，在该研究中，参与者从事一项工业缺陷检查任务，要求他们在电路板上查找制造缺陷。一组参与者独自完成任务，而另一组与机器人团队伙伴合作，接收已经由机器人检查过的电路板。该机器人相当可靠，在将电路板交给人类之前会标记出缺陷。然而，它遗漏了5个缺陷。我们感兴趣的相关行为测量指标是努力程度，通过检查时间和在电路板上检查的面积来衡量，以及缺陷检测绩效。此外，受试者对他们的主观努力、绩效以及对任务的感知责任进行了评分。两组参与者几乎检查了整个电路板表面，从容地进行搜索，并将他们的主观努力程度评为很高。然而，与机器人团队合作的参与者平均发现了3.3个缺陷。在这5次情况下独自工作的人发现的缺陷明显更多——平均为4.2个。这表明参与者在与机器人团队伙伴合作时可能对电路板的搜索不够专注。我们研究中的参与者似乎保持了搜索电路板的体力努力，但似乎搜索时的脑力努力较少，对所采集信息的关注也较少。脑力努力的变化更难测量，但需要将其最小化以确保良好的绩效。
