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This paper presents the effect of a robot's active touch for improving people's motivation. For services in the education and healthcare fields, a robot might be useful for improving the motivation of performing such repetitive and monotonous tasks as exercising or taking medicine. Previous research demonstrated with a robot the effect of user touch on improving its impressions, but they did not clarify whether a robot's touch, especially an active touch, has enough influence on people's motive. We implemented an active touch behavior and experimentally investigated its effect on motivation. In the experiment, a robot requested participants to perform a monotonous task with a robot's active touch, a passive touch, or no touch. The result of experiment showed that an active touch by a robot increased the number of working actions and the amount of working time for the task. This suggests that a robot's active touch can support people to improve their motivation. We believe that a robot's active touch behavior is useful for such robot's services as education and healthcare.

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Abstract-Eyes play a central role in human-human communication, for example, in directing attention and regulating turntaking. For this reason, the eyes have been a central topic in several fields of interaction study. Although many psychological findings have encouraged previous work in both human-computer and human-robot interaction studies, there have been few explorations from the viewpoint of the timing of gaze behavior. In this study, the impression a person forms from an interaction is regarded to be strongly influenced by the feeling of being looked at which is assumed to be based on the responsiveness of the other's gaze to the person's one and be the basis of impression conveyance as a communicative being. In this paper, we built a robot that could move its gaze responsively to its interaction partner's one to explore the effect of responsive gaze. In this paper, we evaluated two primitive ways of controlling a robot's gaze responsively to its partner and confirmed that robots with such responsive gaze could give stronger feeling of being looked at than ones with non-responsive gaze.