Oops, I Did It Again (But I Know It): Robot Failure Consistency and Awareness in Human-Robot Collaboration

In human–robot collaboration, repeated failures are inevitable and can undermine trust and perceptions of robot intelligence. While some failures severely disrupt tasks and others are relatively benign, their cumulative impact on trust is not clearly understood. We investigated whether users perceive repeated failures of the same type differently from varied failures, and how robot awareness of its own failures affects these perceptions. In a collaborative physical task with 54 participants, we manipulated failure sequence (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous) and awareness (none, partial, full). Results show that trust and perceived intelligence were influenced by both current and prior failures, with homogeneous sequences leading to smaller reductions in these evaluations compared to heterogeneous ones. Robots displaying awareness, whether partial or full, were consistently rated higher than unaware robots, particularly for grasping and planning failures. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of how failure type, sequence, and robot awareness shape users’ perceptions of collaborative robots.