Relative importance of spatial and temporal precision for user satisfaction in human-robot object handover interactions

In current society there is a growing call for robotic platforms designed to provide direct assistance to humans within the near future. An essential requirement, if robots are to become accepted as service providers that interact directly with humans, is that the human-robot interactions must not only be safe and reliable, but also produce a satisfying user experience. Here we report results from a study on human-robot object handovers in which we show that timing aspect of the robot response outweighed spatial precision for determining user experience ratings.