Ethological evaluation of human-robot Interaction: Are children more efficient and motivated with computer, virtual agent or robots?

Abstract

Abstract-Nowadays, robots and virtual agents become companions for humans. They seem to have distinct roles in the Human-Agent Interaction. Thus, when developing a new application, it is judicious to wonder which the better is. In the Robadom project, a homecare robot has to assist elderly at home. The robot provides cognitive stimulation game. We developed StimCards, a cognitive card-based game. The principle question is: is the robot the best interlocutor in this context? This paper presents an evaluation of StimCards. Participants are children because French elderly is reluctant to robots and because they will be the future hypothetical users.

The benefit of being physically present: A survey of experimental works comparing copresent robots, telepresent robots and virtual agents

“…1 and considering similar research questions as those proposed here, in particular Wainer et al (2006Wainer et al ( , 2007 and Kiesler et al (2008). Some work has also grouped copresent and telepresent robot conditions into a single category for statistical analysis (e.g., Kiesler et al, 2008) or compared agents that have different morphologies (e.g., Heerink et al, 2009a;Jost et al, 2012a;Komatsu et al, 2011a), which presents a substantial confound for those reported results; instead, agents of similar morphology and appearance would better test hypotheses related to physicality and virtuality. At a minimum, these considerations can be acknowledged when generalizing from a given experiment to broader theoretical concepts.…”

Embodiment in Socially Interactive Robots

“…Bainbridge et al ( 2011) presented results for a book-moving task in which the artificial agents requested unusual behaviors such as throwing books into the trash; the results showed higher compliance rate when requests came from a physical robot than when they came from a virtual agent. In learning tasks, Jost et al (2012a) also showed children to be significantly more motivated by a physical robot when playing a cognitive-simulation game.…”

StimCards: Interactive and configurable Question and Answer game users study conclusion

“…We concluded that AmbiProg could be an efficient "all audience" tool which could allow everyone to control easily a digital environment. Two other experiments investigated the use of different output devices as companion for the participants [6] [7]. The objective was to determine whether children and seniors had a favorite companion to interact with StimCards.…”

“…Thus, it was important to check if the visual programming language (AmbiProg) was easily usable and understandable. Then, two experiments [6][7] compared children and seniors about their favorite companions. They interacted with a computer, a robot and a virtual character.…”