Human Responses to Stimuli Produced by Robot Swarms - the Effect of the Reality-Gap on Psychological State

Abstract

We study the reality-gap effect (the effect of the inherent discrepancy between simulation and reality) on the human psychophysiological state, workload and reaction time in the context of a human-swarm interaction scenario. In our experiments, 37 participants perform a supervision task (i.e., the participants have to respond to visual stimuli produced by a robot swarm) with a real robot swarm and with simulated robot swarms. Our results show that the reality-gap significantly affects the human psychophysiological state, workload and reaction time.