  Strategies are necessary to mitigate the impact of unexpected behavior in
collaborative robotics, and research to develop solutions is lacking. Our aim
here was to explore the benefits of an affective interaction, as opposed to a
more efficient, less error prone but non-communicative one. The experiment took
the form of an omelet-making task, with a wide range of participants
interacting directly with BERT2, a humanoid robot assistant. Having significant
implications for design, results suggest that efficiency is not the most
important aspect of performance for users; a personable, expressive robot was
found to be preferable over a more efficient one, despite a considerable trade
off in time taken to perform the task. Our findings also suggest that a robot
exhibiting human-like characteristics may make users reluctant to 'hurt its
feelings'; they may even lie in order to avoid this.
