It turns out that humans don’t need humanoid machines to trust them and work with them effectively. Sometimes people even interact better with eyeless machines.

Details of the study

Collaborative robots are robots designed to help humans perform routine or dangerous tasks in industrial or medical fields. Some have eyes and an anthropomorphic appearance to make it easier for people to interact with them.

Scientists from Ruhr University in Germany checked whether this was justified. Because we are a cooperative species, eyes are a critical element in ensuring an appropriate level of social life among humans. By communicating feelings and intentions, they allow others to “read” it within us and tune in to better interactions. So how critical is this for inanimate machines?

38 volunteers aged between 18 and 42 participated in the experiment. The authors analyzed their subjective impressions and objective indicators (pulse rate, pupil size, and task completion time).

At the same time, the robot itself had a small screen that popped up eye images that reacted to situations at certain stages of the experiment.

Results

• Participants reported slightly more confidence in robots with eyes.
• But when they interacted with the eyesless robots, they performed tasks faster.
• Also, the people in the team with the eyeless robots had larger pupils; which was an indication of greater interest in the object.

These data suggest that humans may not need humanoid machines to trust and work with them.

We conclude that Cobot’s view may not be that important for manual collaboration.
– say scientists.

They add that objective indicators such as task completion time and student response indicate more comfortable collaboration with eyeless robots.