Multi-party Turn-Taking in Repeated Human–Robot Interactions: An Interdisciplinary Evaluation

Abstract

As social robots become more popular, so arises the need for these social agents to operate in environments involving multiple users. The robot control systems that govern these multi-party interactions require to be evaluated both from the technical and social standpoints. This paper presents the methodology, setup and results for experiment involving the social robot EMYS participating in multi-party interaction where pairs of participants interacted with the robot in a trivia questions game lead by the robot. In total 32 people, 16 pairs, interacted with the robot twice, which resulted in 32 interactions and 64 filled questionnaires. The developed robot's multi-party interaction system was evaluated both in terms of performance and user assessment. The results show that the robot adhering to human turn-taking social norms reduced the number of occurring conversational errors, which improved the communicative performance from 51.5% to 80.5%, in addition, it made the robot perceived as more communicative, cooperative and fitting user expectations by up to 3 points on a 7 point scale. In addition, the study on repeated interactions revealed that user perception of the robot is affected by subsequent interactions, which can be of consequence in future experiments. This first impression caused lasting effect between 1 and 2 points on user assessment of several robot's aspects, even when contradicted by objective performance measurement of the robot's actual behavior.

Toward Designing Social Human-Robot Interactions for Deep Space Exploration

“…Social robots can play a variety of roles ranging from highly knowledgeable agents to social-emotional companions across human group interaction contexts. When engaging with a human group as a highly knowledgeable agent and expert in a task area, a social robot, for example, can provide counseling to couples [53], offer direction guide in public space [9], host group game activities [56], and allocate turns to players [3]. In contrast to an expert role, a robot can take a peer role that strategically displays its vulnerability or emotions with the goal of ameliorating human group dynamics.…”

Integrating Flow Theory and Adaptive Robot Roles: A Conceptual Model of Dynamic Robot Role Adaptation for the Enhanced Flow Experience in Long-term Multi-person Human-Robot Interactions

“…Robots can engage as a leader, oering explicit activity-related support as a coach, resource provider, or activity host. Examples include counseling couples [92], providing guidance in public spaces [28], or hosting group games [99].…”

Survey of Emotions in Human–Robot Interactions: Perspectives from Robotic Psychology on 20 Years of Research

“…Research setting. Most of the reviewed studies feature laboratory settings [19,29,40,68,75,76,82,86,103,105,117,123,131,170,183,187,190,214,223,224,229,242,251,253,256,265,294,295]. Another set of studies is designed as online experiments [19,55,82,110,117,214,215].…”