As high-speed, agile robots become more commonplace, these robots will have the potential to better aid and collaborate with humans. However, due to the increased agility and functionality of these robots, close collaboration with humans can create safety concerns that alter team dynamics and degrade task performance. In this work, we aim to enable the deployment of safe and trustworthy agile robots that operate in proximity with humans. We do so by 1) Proposing a novel human-robot doubles table tennis scenario to serve as a testbed for studying agile, proximate human-robot collaboration and 2) Conducting a user-study to understand how attributes of the robot (e.g., robot competency or capacity to communicate) impact team dynamics, perceived safety, and perceived trust, and how these latent factors affect human-robot collaboration (HRC) performance. We find that robot competency significantly increases perceived trust ($p<.001$), extending skill-to-trust assessments in prior studies to agile, proximate HRC. Furthermore, interestingly, we find that when the robot vocalizes its intention to perform a task, it results in a significant decrease in team performance ($p=.037$) and perceived safety of the system ($p=.009$).

翻译：随着高速、敏捷机器人日益普及，这些机器人将更有潜力协助人类并与之协作。然而，由于这类机器人敏捷性与功能的提升，与人类的近距离协作可能引发安全问题，改变团队动态并降低任务绩效。本研究旨在实现安全可信的敏捷机器人与人类近距协同部署。具体方法为：1) 提出一种新颖的人机双人乒乓球场景，作为研究敏捷、近距人机协作的试验平台；2) 开展用户研究，探究机器人属性（如机器人能力或通信能力）如何影响团队动态、感知安全性与感知信任度，以及这些潜在因素如何影响人机协作（HRC）绩效。研究发现，机器人能力显著提升感知信任度（$p<.001$），将先前研究中技能-信任评估的结论扩展至敏捷、近距人机协作场景。此外，有趣的是，当机器人以语音表达执行任务的意图时，团队绩效（$p=.037$）与系统感知安全性（$p=.009$）均出现显著下降。