FAIHRT: Human-Centered Design of FAIr Human-Robot-Teams

(Project duration: 2026 to 2028)

Funding body: MERCUR Project Funding - MERCUR is the inter-university funding organization of the University Alliance Ruhr.

About the Project

Designing the collaboration of humans and robots has been studied across multiple scientific disciplines and is increasingly entering organizational reality. While previous research has primarily examined dyads—that is, the interaction of one human with one robot—the present project focuses on teams, meaning groups of three or more members working together on a joint task. In such human–robot teams, the perception of fairness plays a central role, as it can influence members’ well-being, behaviour, and collaboration, as well as overall task performance. It is particularly relevant, as robots within a team may be perceived as unfair, while at the same time serving as a design lever for creating fairer teams. Nonetheless, fairness in such teams has so far received little scholarly attention. The aim of this project, therefore, is to systematically analyse fairness in human–robot teams both qualitatively and quantitatively—with a particular focus on robot-related factors (e.g., form and behaviour), team-related factors (e.g., hierarchy, role), and task characteristics.

Involved Partners

University of Duisburg-Essen, Professorship Interactive Systems (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael Prilla)

Ruhr University Bochum, Faculty of Psychology, Junior Professorship Human-Centered Design of Socio-Digital Systems (Prof. Dr. Laura Kunold [neé Hoffmann])

Sources

Alhaji B, Büttner S, Sanjay Kumar S, Prilla M (2024) Trust dynamics in human interaction with an industrial robot. Behav Inf Technol 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2024.2316284

Alhaji B, Prilla M, Rausch A (2021) Trust Dynamics and Verbal Assurances in Human Robot Physical Collaboration. Front Artif Intell 4:103. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2021.703504

Büttner S, Söhngen, Prilla (2025) Anthropomorphization of Robots – a Result of Robot Design or a Result of the Human Tendency to Anthropomorphize? In: RO-MAN 2025 - 34th International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Büttner ST, Sourkounis CM, Gutzmann JC, Prilla M (2023) Excuse Me, Something Is Unfair!-Implications of Perceived Fairness of Service Robots. In: Thirty-first European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2023). Kristiansand, Norway

Büttner ST, Goudarzi M, Prilla M (2024b) Why does the robot only select men? How women and men perceive autonomous social robots that have a gender bias. In: Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2024. ACM, Karlsruhe Germany, pp 479–484

Hanelt A, Wiesche M, Hinz O, Benlian A (2025) Opening the Network of Trust: How Domain Experts in Triadic Relationships Build Trust in AI-Based Counterparts. Manag Inf Syst Q

Hoffmann L, Derksen M, Kopp S (2020) What a Pity, Pepper! How Warmth in Robots’ Language Impacts Reactions to Errors during a Collaborative Task. In: Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’20). ACM, pp 245–247

Hoffmann L, Krämer NC (2021) The persuasive power of robot touch. Behavioral and evaluative consequences of non-functional touch from a robot. Plos One 16:e0249554

Kelch Y, Kluge A, Kunold L (2024) Would you Trust a Robot that Distrusts you? Unveiling the Impact of Robot Trust Disclosure on Human Trust. ACMIEEE Int Conf Hum-Robot Interact 588–592. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610978.3640757

Kunold L, Onnasch L (2022) A Framework to Study and Design Communication with Social Robots. Robotics 11:1–22. https://doi.org/%2010.3390/robotics11060129