The Secret to Making Robots That People Like

What does it take to make robots more welcome in the workplace? The answer may be programming them to make mistakes. Researchers in Austria conducted a study recently in which interactions between robots and human co-workers were examined in a simulated workplace. When some of the robots made mistakes--something they were programmed to do--the robot-human interactions observed were more positive than in sessions where the robots did their jobs perfectly. "People who interacted with the faulty robots liked them more," says Nicole Mirnig, a research fellow at the University of Salzburg's Center for Human-Computer Interaction, and one of six researchers on the study published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI.