Testing robot design features in VR

For my undergraduate honors thesis, I examined how physical appearance and communication modality with varying levels of anthropomorphic design features in a virtual robot affect users’ trust and perceived anthropomorphism.

Testing robot design features in VR

For my undergraduate honors thesis, I examined how physical appearance and communication modality with varying levels of anthropomorphic design features in a virtual robot affect users’ trust and perceived anthropomorphism.

Testing robot design features in VR

For my undergraduate honors thesis, I examined how physical appearance and communication modality with varying levels of anthropomorphic design features in a virtual robot affect users’ trust and perceived anthropomorphism.

MY ROLES

Research
Questionnaire
Design in VR

TITLE

VR Design Researcher

DATE

2021.06 - 2022.05

OUTCOME

Through three sets of experiments that involved 235 participants, we revealed task-specific nuances in users' level of trust towards robots and the significance of anthropomorphic design features in human-robot interaction.

This project has implications for the design of future robots, suggesting more trustworthy and engaging interactions between humans and robots across various real-world applications in a warehouse environment.

Designing robots for trust

Exploring trust and perceived agency in human-robot interaction is like peeking into the future of how we'll work and live alongside robots. It's all about figuring out how much we trust these machines and how much we feel like they're on our team. These insights help us design robots that fit seamlessly into our lives, making tasks easier and collaboration smoother, whether we're in a hospital, warehouse, or anywhere else.

Threefold experiment design

Grouping warehouse tasks

I created groupings of various warehouse tasks to see if there are any differences in people's trust level for different task groupings.

By performing median split on the data our team gathered from Experiment 1, we assigned 6 descriptors to each of the ten warehouse tasks.

For each warehouse task, I created VR animations on Unity that are shown to participants during the experiment.

Results

These findings can be used to design robots across various real-world applications to make the interactions between humans and robots more trustworthy and engaging.