Does time fly when working with robots?
In the future, large-scale multi-robot systems will be revolutionising domains such as precision farming, environmental monitoring, industry and firefighting. But as these robot swarms simplify our lives, many of them will still need human input during operation. How will such interaction affect human operators? Researchers supported by the EU-funded ChronoPilot project have focused on one largely neglected aspect: the effects of robot behaviour on a person’s perception of time. Their study can be accessed in the open data repository ‘Zenodo’. “How we perceive time passing reflects on almost all aspects of our life, for example, how we feel, how we perform in tasks and how we interact with others,” explains study lead author and PhD student Julian Kaduk of the University of Konstanz, Germany, in a video presenting the research. “It is highly subjective as it changes depending on the situation, but it can also be modulated by a number of different stimuli … For example, we all know the feeling of time flying by in some moments while it seems to drag on forever in others.”
Measuring time
There are different ways to quantify time perception. For the study, the research team focused on the passage of time (how fast time seems to pass) and duration judgements (estimate of an interval’s duration). Through a series of simple human-swarm interaction experiments, they investigated whether human operators’ perception of time was affected by changes in the number of robots (one, five or 15) or robot speeds (0.04 or 0.2 metres per second). From the data gathered, the researchers found that the operators’ perceived passage of time is affected by both the number of robots and their speed. A bigger swarm shrinks perceived time, while slower robot speeds expand it. Interestingly, duration judgements are only affected by the number of robots. Additionally, there seems to be a close correlation between perceived passage of time and flow – the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully absorbed in what they are doing. Kaduk discusses the possible future exploitation of the ChronoPilot (Modulating Human Subjective Time Experience) study’s findings in the video: “We envision a future in which the robots are aware of the time perception of their collaborators and can be actively modulated to adaptively changing their behaviour. The goal is not only to have a more integrated and natural level of collaboration, but also possibly improve task performance and well-being by guiding the user into a state of optimal cognitive flow … Additionally, we can see advantages in time-critical scheduling tasks and situations where the user input timing is of importance … By changing the user’s time perception, we can guide the timing decisions for optimal performance.” For more information, please see: ChronoPilot project website
Keywords
ChronoPilot, robot, robot swarm, time, timing, time perception, cognitive flow
