Socializing with Robots

The term Industry 4.0 symbolizes new forms of technology and artificial intelligence, which will soon be embedded within production technologies. Smart robots are the game changers within smart factories, and they will work with humans in indispensable teams within the value chain. With this fourth industrial revolution, classical production lines are going through comprehensive modernization, which is commonly oriented to in-the-box manufacturing. Humans and machines will work side by side in so-called “hybrid teams.” Thus, the success of these future production concepts will strongly depend on the successful implementation of direct cooperation between humans and robots. Hybrid teams will, more than ever, support demographic and diverse team structures. The difficulties behind physical limitations of workers are already being compensated through human-robot-cooperation, for example, through robots assisting with heavy lifting or physical duties. As a step further, robots should be able to identify and adapt to individual strengths and weaknesses and take over the role of a workmate, helping to construct knowledge in social, teamwork-oriented processes. What is necessary to change the role of a robot from a tool to a workmate? Can appearance and behaviour of the robot influence the team building processes? This chapter seeks to blend human demands of communication and cooperation in teams with empirical results of an experiment in a virtual factory of the future. The empirical study researches if the appearance of the robot and its behaviour influences the reception of the robot as a partner and the human cooperation behaviour, for instance, in terms of a shared understanding.