When robots object: Evidence for the utility of verbal, but not necessarily spoken protest

Abstract

Future autonomous robots will likely encounter situations in which humans end up commanding the robots to perform tasks that robot ought to object. A previous study showed that robot appearance does not seem to affect human receptiveness to robot protest produced in response to inappropriate human commands. However, this previous work used robots that communicate the objection to the human in spoken natural language, thus allowing for the possibility that spoken language, not the content of the objection and its justification, were responsible for human reactions. In this paper, we specifically set out to answer this open question by comparing spoken robot protest with written robot protest.