Footage from a live experiment (all passers-by were unaware of their participation in this experiment) investigating how humans interact with robots of varying robot autonomy levels. As part of a project for a graduate robotics course at Carnegie Mellon University, we designed and constructed an assistive robot — Janitobot, whose purpose was to clean the floors of a campus building — to study how various conditions can affect empathy in human-robot interaction. In this experiment, the robot feigned malfunction and requested assistance from people passing by. While varying the robot autonomy level, we evaluated the willingness of people to help.
