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This study explores how people's social response toward a humanoid robot can change when we vary the number of the active degrees of freedom in the robot's head and face area. We investigate this problem by conducting two wizard-of-oz user studies that situate an elder person in a self-disclosure dialogue with a remotely operated robot. In our first study, we investigated the effect of expressive head gestures with a four-degree-of-freedom neck. In the second study we focused on the face where we investigated the effect of expressive eyebrow movement versus active gaze and eyelid movement. In the first study, we found that participants are willing to disclose more to the robot when the robot moved its neck in an expressive manner. In the second study, our data suggests a trend where gaze and expressive eyelid movement results in more disclosure over eyebrow movement

Robotic companions offer a unique combination of embodiment and computation which open many new interesting opportunities in the field of pediatric care. As these new technologies are developed, we must consider the central research questions of how such systems should be designed and what the appropriate applications for such systems are. In this paper we present the Huggable, a robotic companion in the form factor of a teddy bear and outline a series of studies we are planning to run using the Huggable in a pediatric care unit.

Robots as an embodied, multi-modal technology have great potential to be used as a new type of communication device.In this paper we outline our development of the Huggable robot as a semi-autonomous robot avatar for two specific types of remote interactionfamily communication and education.Through our discussion we highlight how we have applied six important elements in our system to allow for the robot to function as a richly embodied communication channel.