This study investigates how different forms of operator embodiment (avatar robots, telepresence robots, and direct in-person interaction) affect people’s willingness and ability to approach and initiate social interactions with strangers in public spaces. Participants were tasked with distributing information to pedestrians in a shopping mall across the three embodiment conditions. We examined behavioral performance (e.g., frequency of approaches, hesitation time), self-reported anxiety, fear of talking to strangers, and post-interaction reflections. Results showed that participants using robot-mediated embodiment (avatar and telepresence robots) exhibited greater social engagement and reported less hesitation time, lower state anxiety, and reduced fear of talking to strangers compared to the in-person condition. Notably, the avatar robot condition was associated with a greater reduction in fear of talking to strangers than the telepresence condition. Our interview results suggest that the reduction may be attributed to the anonymity provided by the avatar, which decreases self-consciousness and social pressure. Additionally, many participants noted that pedestrians showed heightened interest in the robots, which made initiating interactions easier. Telepresence robots also offered psychological relief by removing the need for physical presence, although some participants were more self-aware due to their visible face and voice. While most participants reported feeling nervous in face-to-face interactions, some appreciated the physical freedom and focused delivery enabled by in-person engagement. These findings suggest that teleoperated robots can mitigate psychological barriers in socially demanding tasks, and that embodiment plays a role in shaping operator experience and social outcomes.

We define authoritative presence as letting people experience authority through human-made technology in sensory or non-sensory ways. Our goal is to design a robot that creates the impression of possessing capabilities worthy of respect as a source of authority, thereby enhancing compliance without attributing that authority to external sources, such as a specific person or organization. We hypothesized that strategies commonly used in the Wizard-of-Oz method could help manipulate authoritative presence as it strives to ensure that the robot is not perceived as having additional abilities beyond those introduced by the manipulations. Wizards typically need to maintain the robot’s functionality and abilities at an appropriate level to minimize unwanted influence on participants’ perceptions and interactions. By interviewing HRI researchers who have wizarded, we summarized their usual strategies and implemented the opposite behaviors in a robot to investigate if this would contribute to authoritative presence. Based on the findings, we designed four behaviors that include (1) let the robot have an open-ended conversation with people, (2) randomize the robot’s reaction delay timing, (3) let the robot move with inconsistent velocity, and (4) let the robot perceive people’s status without looking at them. To evaluate the impact of these behaviors, we conducted a video-based online experiment with 942 participants, using a between-subjects design. The experiment aimed to determine whether the behaviors conveying authoritative presence would make people perceive the robot as having more authority and increase their likelihood of complying with its requests. A mediation analysis indicated that despite a decrease in perceived authority, the imply authoritative presence condition had a positive effect on participant compliance. Our study formally introduces the concept of authoritative presence, providing a proof-of-concept for how robots can create authoritative presence through specific behaviors. This work lays the groundwork for future research on authority and robotics.

We investigate how gender stereotypes in authority influence the perceptions and behavior of avatar robots operators and their interlocutors. Gender stereotypes, which typically place men in more authoritative positions than women, are present in not only inter-human but also human-robot interaction. As avatar robots become more integrated into our lives and serve for diverse usages, they may be utilized in positions where they require authority. We study how avatar robot gender and operator gender affect expressions and perception of gender stereotypes in a customer service scenario with 41 pairs of participants. Operators controlled binary gendered avatar robots one at a time, acting as shopkeepers that had to assert authority over customers behaving improperly. The operators perceived their authority to be higher with male avatar robots compared to female ones, regardless of operator gender. We did not detect an effect on customer's perception of the shopkeeper's authority. While less than half of operators and customers perceived authority for reasons related to traditional gender stereotypes, others observed behaviors that did not align with stereotypes. Avatar embodiment may also help operators assert authority safely due to being physically hidden from the customers.

For haptic guidance, vibrotactile feedback is a commonly-used mechanism, but requires users to interpret its complicated patterns especially in 3D guidance, which is not intuitive and increases their mental effort. Furthermore, for haptic guidance in virtual reality (VR), not only guidance performance but also realism should be considered. Since vibrotactile feedback interferes with and reduces VR realism, it may not be proper for VR haptic guidance. Therefore, we propose a wearable device, GuideBand, to provide intuitive 3D multilevel force guidance upon the forearm, which reproduces an effect that the forearm is pulled and guided by a virtual guider or telepresent person in VR. GuideBand uses three motors to pull a wristband at different force levels in 3D space. Such feedback usually requires much larger and heavier robotic arms or exoskeletons. We conducted a just-noticeable difference study to understand users’ force level distinguishability. Based on the results, we performed a study to verify that compared with state-of-the-art vibrotactile guidance, GuideBand is more intuitive, needs a lower level of mental effort, and achieves similar guidance performance. We further conducted a VR experience study to observe how users combine and complement visual and force guidance, and prove that GuideBand enhances realism in VR guidance.

As experts and expertise are increasingly distributed across distance, remote collaboration on physical tasks also becomes popular. Physical collaboration requires collaborators to produce and resolve references to physical objects unambiguously. We present a novel annotation system called AlphaRead that enables users to add and see readable annotations of physical objects, such as labels in letter, in a dynamic video-mediated workspace. Explicit support for object readability can help people coordinate language and vision for collaboration, and allow them to directly read out object labels as a way to make unambiguous references. Object readability as a resource of linguistic references can reduce the ambiguity and complexity associated with traditional methods of referential expressions such as deictic pronouns ("this" or "that") or descriptions of object attributes. In a video-mediated collaboration study, by making objects referable with readable labels, we improved the communication efficiency over the alternative options of using raw video or video with non-readable annotations to collaborate. We also identified patterns of language behaviors that people exhibited with readable labels and discussed the implications to the design of collaboration support tools.