A robot with style, because you are worth it!

Abstract

Research in social human-robot interaction gets more and more of its inspiration from psychology to make robots' behaviour more socially acceptable when among humans. In the context of rendering a robot more suitable to be a companion for children, we propose different parenting styles (namely authoritative and permissive) and evaluate them. As a first step, we use expression cues of the parenting styles; we implemented behaviours of different styles played out by two robots, Nao and Reeti, with body and facial channels respectively for communication. 88 parents watched videos of the robots and replied to a questionnaire about the authoritativeness of the robots. The results showed that the styles were perceptible through the non-verbal behaviours of the robots. The dominant condition was perceived to be more authoritative than the less dominant condition, which validates the hypothesis. We also notice an effect of the robot's modality of expressions; further work should confirm hypotheses on the modality's effects of the perception on authoritativeness of the robot.

10 Years of Human-NAO Interaction Research: A Scoping Review

“…Although children prefer NAO, they find easier to understand the gestures of a taller R3 (Kose et al, 2014) and rate Baxter robot as more positive and acceptable than NAO (Cuan et al, 2018). NAO was reportedly used along with Aibo in gesture experiments (Andry et al, 2011), iCub in eliciting behaviors on humans (Anzalone et al, 2015), Wifibot to carry the NAO (Canal et al, 2016), Pepper in human head imitation (Cazzato et al, 2019), Turtelbot in providing elderly care (DiMaria et al, 2017), Robokind R25 in interviewing humans (Henkel et al, 2019), Reeti (Johal et al, 2014) in expressing different parenting styles, R3 (Kose et al, 2014) in performing sign language gestures, Palro and Gemini (Pan et al, 2013) in evaluating interaction styles, and PR2 in identifying preferred human-robot proxemics (Rajamohan et al, 2019).…”