Bridging the Awareness Gap: Socially Mediated State Externalization for Transparent Distributed Home Robots
This addresses the user experience problem of trust and transparency in distributed home robots, offering an incremental architectural improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of users losing awareness of robot states in distributed home systems when robots operate out of sight, which reduces trust and transparency. It shows that using a social mediator robot to externalize hidden states significantly increases user attention (from 15.8% to 84.6%) and improves perceived qualities like dependability, with 83% of participants preferring this approach and no significant increase in task completion time.
Distributed multi-robot systems for the home often require robots to operate out of the user's sight, creating a state awareness gap that can diminish trust and perceived transparency and control. This paper investigates whether real-time, socially mediated state externalization can bridge this gap without compromising task performance. We developed a system where a co-located social mediator robot (Pepper) externalizes the hidden execution states of an out-of-sight mobile manipulator (Stretch~3) for voice-driven object retrieval and delivery, where task-level states are synchronized and externalized through verbal updates and visual progress display. In a counterbalanced within-subject study (N=30), we compared a baseline of Autonomous Hidden Execution against Socially Mediated State Externalization. Our results show that externalization significantly increases user task-focused attention (from 15.8% to 84.6%, p<.001) and substantially improves perceived perspicuity, dependability, stimulation, and attractiveness (all p<.001). Furthermore, 83% of participants preferred the externalized condition, and this improvement in user experience was achieved without a statistically significant increase in end-to-end task completion time (p=.271). The results suggest that socially mediated state externalization is an effective architectural mechanism for designing more transparent and trustworthy distributed robot systems, ultimately enhancing user experience without sacrificing performance in distributed home robot deployments.