It Gets Worse Before it Gets Better: Timing of Instructions in Close Human-Robot Collaboration

A micro-analysis of the timing of people's actions in close human-robot collaborations shows that people expect robots to attend to interactional achievements in the same way as humans do; that is, they expect that in a repeated task, the robot builds on the common ground acquired in the previous interaction. This expectation is revealed through increased response times by the human users, which leads to less fluent interactions; however, users recover over the course of the next actions, orienting at the principle of least collaborative effort. The paper thus illustrates a) how a qualitative microanalysis provides a methodological tool for uncovering users' expectations online (in comparison to post hoc by means of questionnaires, for instance), and b) what exactly it is that users expect.