  As high-speed, agile robots become more commonplace, these robots will have
the potential to better aid and collaborate with humans. However, due to the
increased agility and functionality of these robots, close collaboration with
humans can create safety concerns that alter team dynamics and degrade task
performance. In this work, we aim to enable the deployment of safe and
trustworthy agile robots that operate in proximity with humans. We do so by 1)
Proposing a novel human-robot doubles table tennis scenario to serve as a
testbed for studying agile, proximate human-robot collaboration and 2)
Conducting a user-study to understand how attributes of the robot (e.g., robot
competency or capacity to communicate) impact team dynamics, perceived safety,
and perceived trust, and how these latent factors affect human-robot
collaboration (HRC) performance. We find that robot competency significantly
increases perceived trust ($p<.001$), extending skill-to-trust assessments in
prior studies to agile, proximate HRC. Furthermore, interestingly, we find that
when the robot vocalizes its intention to perform a task, it results in a
significant decrease in team performance ($p=.037$) and perceived safety of the
system ($p=.009$).
