Research in social robotics is commonly focused on designing robots that imitate human behavior. While this might increase a user’s satisfaction and acceptance of robots at first glance, it does not automatically aid a non-expert user in naturally interacting with robots, and might hurt their ability to correctly anticipate a robot’s capabilities. We argue that a faulty mental model, that the user has of the robot, is one of the main sources of confusion. In this work, we investigate how communicating technical concepts of robotic systems to users affect their mental models, and how this can increase the quality of human-robot interaction. We conducted an online study and investigated possible ways of improving users’ mental models. Our results underline that communicating technical concepts can form an improved mental model. Consequently, we show the importance of consciously designing robots that express their capabilities and limitations.

中文翻译：

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为什么机器人应该是技术性的

社交机器人的研究通常集中在设计模仿人类行为的机器人上。虽然乍一看这可能会提高用户对机器人的满意度和接受度，但它不会自动帮助非专家用户自然地与机器人交互，并且可能会损害他们正确预测机器人能力的能力。我们认为，用户对机器人的错误心理模型是造成混淆的主要来源之一。在这项工作中，我们研究了向用户传达机器人系统的技术概念如何影响他们的心智模型，以及这如何提高人机交互的质量。我们进行了一项在线研究，并调查了改善用户心智模型的可能方法。我们的结果强调，交流技术概念可以形成改进的心智模型。最后，