Impact of Different Failures on a Robot's Perceived Reliability

2026-03-09

AI Summary

This study investigates how different types of robotic failures—specifically slippage, freezing, and incorrect target selection—affect perceived reliability (PR) and examines the natural recovery of PR in the absence of explicit repair behaviors. Through a preregistered online video experiment combining a behavioral betting task with questionnaire-based assessments, the research finds that error-type failures impair PR significantly less than slippage or freezing, with some even misperceived as successful actions. Crucially, a single subsequent successful execution effectively restores PR to levels equivalent to consistently fault-free performance. These findings provide empirical support for designing trustworthy human–robot interactions by identifying which failure types warrant prioritized mitigation and highlighting the pivotal role of successful behavior in trust restoration.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success

Abstract

Robots fail, potentially leading to a loss in the robot's perceived reliability (PR), a measure correlated with trustworthiness. In this study we examine how various kinds of failures affect the PR of the robot differently, and how this measure recovers without explicit social repair actions by the robot. In a preregistered and controlled online video study, participants were asked to predict a robot's success in a pick-and-place task. We examined manipulation failures (slips), freezing (lapses), and three types of incorrect picked objects or place goals (mistakes). Participants were shown one of 11 videos -- one of five types of failure, one of five types of failure followed by a successful execution in the same video, or a successful execution video. This was followed by two additional successful execution videos. Participants bet money either on the robot or on a coin toss after each video. People's betting patterns along with a qualitative analysis of their survey responses highlight that mistakes are less damaging to PR than slips or lapses, and some mistakes are even perceived as successes. We also see that successes immediately following a failure have the same effect on PR as successes without a preceding failure. Finally, we show that successful executions recover PR after a failure. Our findings highlight which robot failures are in higher need of repair in a human-robot interaction, and how trust could be recovered by robot successes.

Problem

• robot failures
• perceived reliability
• trust
• human-robot interaction
• failure recovery

Innovation

• perceived reliability
• robot failures
• trust recovery
• human-robot interaction
• failure typology