You're delaying my task?! The Impact of Task Order and Motive on Perceptions of a Robot

Recent work has suggested that a robot that interrupts assigned tasks for the sake of curiosity is perceived as less competent, but that communicating acknowledgment of the curious behavior can mitigate some of those feelings [1]. In real-world situations, there are many reasons why a robot's task could be interrupted in favor of another. For example, a robot handling requests for tasks from people in different locations could navigate more efficiently if it interleaves those tasks, but it ideally would not do so at the expense of the users' perceptions of the robot. In order to understand the impact of different task interleaving patterns on human perceptions of a robot's behavior, we performed a study in which a robot performed a delivery task and an investigative task, interleaving them in various ways. The participants were told either that the investigative task was motivated by a request from another person, motivated by curiosity, or they received no information about why the robot performed the action. While participants acknowledged that interleaving tasks should be allowed, they rated the robot as more competent when its tasks were not interleaved. They were most receptive to interleaving when they knew the investigative task was for another person and less receptive to long task detours away from the delivery route, especially when the inspection task was motivated by curiosity.