As future human-robot teams are envisioned for a variety of application domains, researchers have begun to investigate how humans and robots can communicate effectively and naturally in the context of human-robot team tasks. While a growing body of work is focused on human-robot communication and human perceptions thereof, there is currently little work on human perceptions of robot-robot communication. Understanding how robots should communicate information to each other in the presence of human teammates is an important open question for human-robot teaming. In this paper, we present two human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments investigating the human perception of verbal and silent robotrobot communication as part of a human-robot team task. The results suggest that silent communication of task-dependent, human-understandable information among robots is perceived as creepy by cooperative, co-located human teammates. Hence, we propose that, absent specific evidence to the contrary, robots in cooperative human-robot team settings need to be sensitive to human expectations about overt communication, and we encourage future work to investigate possible ways to modulate such expectations.

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Facial masking is a symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD) in which humans lose the ability to quickly create refined facial expressions. This difficulty of people with PD can be mistaken for apathy or dishonesty by their caregivers and lead to a breakdown in social relationships. We envision future "robot mediators" that could ease tensions in these caregiver-client relationships by intervening when interactions go awry. However, it is currently unknown whether people with PD would even accept a robot as part of their healthcare processes. We thus conducted a first humanrobot interaction study to assess the extent to which people with PD are willing to discuss their health status with a robot. We specifically compared a robot interviewer to a human interviewer in a within-subjects design that allowed us to control for individual differences of the subjects with PD caused by their individual disease progression. We found that participants overall reacted positively to the robot, even though they preferred interactions with the human interviewer. Importantly, the robot performed at a human level at maintaining the participants' dignity, which is critical for future social mediator robots for people with PD.