Sharing Spaces, Sharing Lives – The Impact of Robot Mobility on User Perception of a Home Companion Robot

Abstract

This paper examines the role of spatial behaviours in building human-robot relationships. A group of 8 participants, involved in a long-term HRI study, interacted with an artificial agent using different embodiments over a period of one and a half months. The robot embodiments had similar interactional and expressive capabilities, but only one embodiment was capable of moving. Participants reported feeling closer to the robot embodiment capable of physical movement and rated it as more likable. Results suggest that while expressive and communicative abilities may be important in terms of building affinity and rapport with human interactants, the importance of physical interactions when negotiating shared physical space in real time should not be underestimated.

Exploring socially intelligent recharge behaviour for human-robot interaction

“…The results shows higher average ratings for the apologetic TB in comparison to neutral TB in regards to: I felt in company of the TB, TB's recharge behaviour was acceptable, I felt neglected while TB was recharging, The TB was available to interact with me. These preliminary results supports both hypothesis H1, H2 and also conform with earlier long-term HRI studies performed with stationary and moving robots [5]. …”

Social Impact of Recharging Activity in Long-Term HRI and Verbal Strategies to Manage User Expectations During Recharge

“…Autonomous robots may also have an influence on user perception particularly if they are mobile (Cesta et al, 2007;Syrdal et al, 2013) reported that the role of the robot's ability to move and share the physical space with the user affected the formation of human-robot relationships. Lindner and Eschenbach (2013) proposed the idea of social placement for a mobile robot, taking into account affordances while recharging.…”

“The Fridge Door is Open”–Temporal Verification of a Robotic Assistant’s Behaviours

“…Further details about robot house, robot architecture and control systems and experiments with participants in the robot house can be found, for example, in [3,12,16,11,13]. This paper builds on and extends the work described in [18].…”

“…[12,16]). One of the robots in the house is the (commercially available) Care-O-bot robot manufactured by Fraunhofer IPA [10].…”