The Importance of Situational Awareness in Future Construction Work: Toward the Effects of Faulty Robots, Trust, and Time Pressure

Abstract

Introducing robots to future construction sites will impose extra uncertainties and necessitate workers’ situational awareness (SA) of them. While previous literature has suggested that system errors, trust changes, and time pressure may affect SA, the linkage between these factors and workers’ SA in the future construction industry is understudied. Therefore, this study aimed to fill the research gap by simulating a future bricklaying worker-robot collaborative task where participants experienced robot errors and time pressure during the interaction. The results indicated that robot errors significantly impacted subjects’ trust in robots. However, under time pressure in time-critical construction tasks, workers were tended to recover their reduced trust in the faulty robots (sometimes over-trust) and reduce their situational awareness. The contributions of this study lie in providing insights into the importance of SA in future jobsites and the need for investigating effective strategies for better preparing future workers.