Developing and Evaluating Ecologically Valid Study Tasks to Investigate Human-Robot Teaming

Psychological safety, the shared belief held by team members that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, has been assessed in many human teams in the corporate workplace, yet it has not been analyzed to the same extent in complex environments or with multi-agent teams. Many studies have either evaluated team dynamics in human-robot interaction (HRI) completely in the wild or in highly controlled laboratory studies. This work presents operationally relevant study tasks that can be implemented in a controlled laboratory environment to characterize psychological safety in HRI. 33 participants completed 2 different tasks repeatedly with a human and robot teammate. We observed higher performance scores when participants worked with a human vs. a robot, suggesting that these tasks elicit differentiable performance responses based on team type that could be related to differences in psychological safety.