Abstract
It is expected that human-robot collaboration will increase in the future. Some people are already experiencing this in their working life, but other people are still skeptical about it. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new challenges to the world’s population and has a strong impact on our everyday working life. The question arises, whether the perceived involvement in the current situation as well as the occupational field influence the attitudes towards human-robot collaboration. Overall, 54 men, 45 women and 1 non-binary (N = 100) aged between 18 and 71 years (M = 29.87, SD = 14.00) participated in an exploratory online study. The results of the study show that the participants’ attitudes towards the use of collaborative robots in the three different categories assembly, logistics and cleaning were rather positive. Furthermore, assembly and logistics tasks were assessed as significant more conceivable for human-robot collaboration than cleaning tasks. Interestingly, participants that were more concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic assessed the use of collaborative robots overall significant more positive than other participants did. Attitude differences due to the different occupational fields of the participants did not reach the level of significance. In addition, the participants described different functions in which they could imagine collaborative robots in the three categories assembly, logistics and cleaning. The results of the presented exploratory study shall help to get more insight in this important future field.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ajoudani, A., Zanchettin, A.M., Ivaldi, S., Albu-Schäffer, A., Kosuge, K., Khatib, O.: Progress and prospects of the human–robot collaboration. Auton. Robots 42(5), 957–975 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-017-9677-2
Vanderborght, B.: Unlocking the potential of industrial human–robot collaboration. A vision on industrial collaborative robots for economy and society. European Commission, Brussels (2019)
European Commission: Public attitudes towards robots. Special Eurobarometer 382, report (2012). 97 pp.
Katz, J.E., Halpern, D.: Attitudes towards robots suitability for various jobs as affected robot appearance. Behav. Inf. Technol. 33(9), 941–953 (2014)
Takayama, L., Ju, W., Nass, C.: Beyond dirty, dangerous and dull: what everyday people think robots should do. In: Proceedings 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Amsterdam, pp. 25–32 (2008)
Kravchenko, O., Leshchenko, M., Marushchak, D., Vdovychenko, Y., Boguslavska, S.: The digitalization as a global trend and growth factor of the modern economy. SHS Web Conf. 65, 1–5 (2019)
Faraj, S., Renno, W., Bhardwaj, A.: Unto the breach: what the COVID-19 pandemic exposes about digitalization. Inf. Organ. 31, 1–7 (2021)
Mumm, J.-N., Rodler, S., Mumm, M.-L., Bauer, R.M., Stief, C.G.: Digitale Innovation in der Medizin – die COVID-19-Pandemie als Akzelerator von “digital health” [Digital innovation in medicine - the COVID 19 pandemic as an accelerator of “digital health”]. J. Urol. Urogynäkol. AT. 1–5 (2020)
Humphreys, G.: Digital health and COVID-19. Bull. World Health Organ. 98, 731–732 (2020)
Kim, S., Kim, J., Badu-Baiden, F., et al.: Preference for robot service or human service in hotels? Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Int. J. Hosp. Manage. 93, 102795 (2021)
Zeng, Z., Chen, P.-J., Lew, A.A.: From high-touch to high-tech: COVID-19 drives robotics adoption. Tourism Geographies. Int. J. Tour. Space Place Environ. 22(3), 724–734 (2020)
Zhang, Y.: A big data analyses of public perception of service robots amid COVID-19. Adv. Hosp. Tour. Res. 9(1), 234–242 (2021)
Savela, N., Turja, T., Oksanen, A.: Social acceptance of robots in different occupational fields: a systematic literature review. Int. J. Soc. Robot. 10(4), 493–502 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0452-5
Mayring, P.: Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken [Qualitative content ana-lysis: basics and techniques]. Beltz, Weinheim and Basel (2010)
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Klara Faitsch for her support in conducting the study, and all participants who participated. Author’s Statement. The authors state no conflict of interest. Informed consent has been provided from all participants of the online study. The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Furtwangen University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wagner-Hartl, V., Pohling, K., Rössler, M., Strobel, S., Maag, S. (2021). Attitudes Towards Human-Robot Collaboration and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S. (eds) HCI International 2021 - Late Breaking Posters. HCII 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1498. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90176-9_38
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90176-9_38
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90175-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90176-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)