Disentangling the Effects of Robot Affect, Embodiment, and Autonomy on Human Team Members in a Mixed-Initiative Task

Many future robotic scenarios will require robots to work with humans in teams. It is thus critical to ensure that those robots will be able to work effectively with humans. While various dimensions of robots such as autonomy, embodiment or interaction style have been investigated separately, no previous study has looked at those three dimensions together. In this paper, we report results from extensive experiments showing that all three dimensions interact in complex ways, thus demonstrating the insufficiency of exploring these dimensions individually. Based on the results, we conclude with suggestions for interaction designs and for future studies. Keywords-human-robot interaction; adjustable autonomy; embodiment; robot; simulation; affect; user study