A Robot with Style, because you are Worth it!
In Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014). pages 1201-1206. 2014.
Wafa Johal, Gaëlle Calvary, Sylvie Pesty
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.
However, which theorems of human cognition and psychology can be made applicable for robots and to make them communicate like humans is a domain currently being worked on.
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 expression by the robots were accurate.
Authoritative style was found to be more directive than permissive style, 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.