The Benefits of Interactions with Physically Present Robots over Video-Displayed Agents

Abstract

This paper explores how a robot's physical presence affects human judgments of the robot as a social partner. For this experiment, participants collaborated on simple book-moving tasks with a humanoid robot that was either physically present or displayed via a live video feed. Multiple tasks individually examined the following aspects of social interaction: greetings, cooperation, trust, and personal space. Participants readily greeted and cooperated with the robot whether present physically or in live video display. However, participants were more likely both to fulfill an unusual request and to afford greater personal space to the robot when it was physically present, than when it was shown on live video. The same was true when the live video displayed robot's gestures were augmented with disambiguating 3-D information. Questionnaire data support these behavioral findings and also show that participants had an overall more positive interaction with the physically present robot.

Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot?

“…Previous studies have shown differences in both attitude and learning gains in a similar comparison [2,16]. However, in our study the two conditions were much more similar: the "virtual agent" had the same emotional sounds of excitement and frustration; the sound was emitted in both conditions from the speakers, for increased volume; there was no virtual character on the tablet.…”

“…the same Story-maker app is used in exactly the same manner across conditions, we hypothesize that the children will learn new words, but not differently with respect to the curious and non-curious conditions. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that the robot conditions will have larger effects than the curious tablet condition, due to the physical embodiment of the robot [2].…”

“…This suggests that learning gains are higher with a physical robot [2,16]. Moreover, learning outcomes for such a short encounter are suggestive of longer term gains, but a longitudinal study is required in order to assess learning outcomes of curious vs. non-curious and virtual vs. physical interventions.…”

A Comparison of Avatar-, Video-, and Robot-Mediated Interaction on Users’ Trust in Expertise

“…Additionally, Morita et al (2007) showed that the eye gaze of a remote person was more recognizable when reproduced by a robot than by a live video. Bainbridge et al (2011) explored how a robot's physical presence affects human judgments of the robot as a social partner. They found that participants were more likely to fulfill a trustrelated task when the robot was physically present, than when it was shown on live video.…”

“…Recently, robot-mediated interaction has emerged as a viable option. These systems seek to increase the richness of the interaction and to improve communication channels by bringing them closer to face-to-face interaction (Bainbridge et al, 2011). The main distinctive feature of these systems is the physical presence of the robot.…”